Pearls offer an astonishing array of colors for everyone to love. From classic white Akoya pearls to jet black Tahitian pearls, silver and gold South Sea pearls and even deep shades of lavender to yes, even blue!

Use the Table of Contents below to navigate this article to view pictures and descriptions of the most common pearl colors.

Whether it’s the iconic Akoya pearl, or glamorous South Sea pearls, white pearls have been the “It Pearl” for literally centuries. Women and men have worn and loved white pearls because of their subtle elegance and versatility.

Dark and exotic, black pearls have captured the imagination of men and women around the world for centuries. A hundred times more rare than white pearls, black pearls have been imbued with all kinds of mythical properties and lore.

Opulent, luxurious and best of all, naturally colored, Golden South Sea pearls are some of the largest and most valuable cultured pearls in the world. Ranging in color from pale Champagne to intense 24K golden hues, these cultured pearls hail from the tropical lagoons and atolls of the Philippine Islands and Australia.

Naturally colored pink pearls are cultured in the Freshwater pearl mussel, Hyriopsis cumingii (along with various hybrid mussels bred to produce unique colors and sizes) in freshwater aquaculture ponds on China. Each Freshwater pearl mussel can be nucleated up to 25 times on each side of the shell, making for a stunningly colorful harvest.

Naturally colored Lavender Freshwater pearls are cultured in the Freshwater pearl mussel, Hyriopsis cumingii. These large pearl mussels are bred and cared for in freshwater aquaculture ponds and lakes in China. Nucleated up to 25 times per each side of its shell, a Freshwater pearl harvest is a very colorful affair, yielding shades of Lavender, Pink, Peach and White pearl colors.

Perhaps the rarest pearl color of them all, true blue pearls are one of the wonders of the world. Naturally blue-colored pearls come in astonishing array of hues from pastel Sky Blue to dark Midnight Blue colors, with an even wider array of dazzling overtones.

Chocolate pearls became incredibly popular quite recently – designers such as Erica Courtney helped solidify their status as red carpet worthy gemstones. Chocolate Tahitian pearls can be naturally colored or dyed their trademark colors … Guess which ones we prefer.

The term ‘Multi-color’ refers to a layout design rather than a pearl color, and can be composed of Freshwater, Tahitian or South Sea pearl types.

Oysters make colored pearls in a variety of ways, starting with the color of the outer edge of the shell ⁠— called the mollusk’s “lip.” For instance, Tahitian pearls get their light to dark charcoal grey colors from the black-lipped saltwater Tahitian pearl oyster, Pinctada margaritifera. Notice the grey to silvery hues present on the edge of the shell.

Another way pearls get their color is from microscopic pigments inside the conchiolin layer. Conchiolin is the organic “glue” that holds the crystalline aragonite layers together. Conchiolin cements these platelets together (think of the structure of a pearl as something like a brick wall, and the conchiolin is the cement).

When the conchiolin is pigmented with grey, brown, reddish-brown, black or other colors, this pigment shows through the thin crystalline layers to give the appearance of blue, grey, yellow, green, bronze, black pink and orange hues in the surface of the pearl.

Lastly, aragonite platelets are the semi-transparent, hexagonal-shaped, microns-thin crystals that make up the prismatic layers of the pearl. When white light strikes and penetrates the surface of the pearl and its layers, the light beam is refracted back at the viewer in its entire spectrum, allowing the viewer to see the colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. This phenomenon also heavily influences the pearl’s overtone, or faint iridescent colors that are visible over the body color of the pearl.

Golden South Sea Pearls.Left: Medium Golden Tone with Light Rose OvertonesRight: Deep Golden South Sea pearl with Bronze and Green Overtones.

As you can see, each of the Golden South Sea pearls above displays varying shades of Golden body color intensity, however the overtone or faint iridescent color lying over the main body color influence the pearl’s overall color to the viewer. The pearl on the left shows a faintly blushing “warm” tone due to its Rose overtones, while the pearl on the right appears much “cooler” due to its Green and Bronze overtones.

While the science of pearls is still evolving, we now have a fairly good idea of how a pearl’s color is influenced both by its environment and by the host mollusk. These factors are what gives pearls natural colors ranging from white to chocolate as shown above in this article.