CAN YOU WEAR PEARLS IN THE WATER?

There is a version of this question that arrives every July, almost always from a phone, almost always with the piece already in hand. You are on a terrace, or at the edge of a pool, or in a bathroom with the shower already running, and you want to know whether the necklace you are wearing will survive the next twenty minutes. It is a fair question, and most of the internet answers it badly.

Almost everything written about pearl care is calibrated for an inherited strand of Akoya pearls worth three thousand euros. The rule it repeats, never water, never perfume, last on and first off, is sound advice for that object. Applied to a twenty-two euro pair of earrings, it produces paralysis: you conclude that you cannot actually wear the thing you just bought. So here is the honest version, calibrated to the pieces we make, freshwater pearls set on plated findings, which is a different object with different weaknesses. If you want the longer view first, start with our guide to freshwater pearl jewellery.

What Actually Happens When A Pearl Gets Wet

A pearl is not a stone. It is built from hundreds of microscopic layers of aragonite held together by conchiolin, an organic binder, and that binder is the vulnerable part. It does not fear water in the way a piece of paper does. It fears what water carries and what water leaves behind.

Clean fresh water, briefly, is the least serious thing that can happen to a freshwater pearl. Rinsing your hands, getting caught in rain, a splash in a lake: none of that will ruin anything. What does the damage is the dissolved content, the repetition, and the drying. A pearl that goes wet and dry, wet and dry, twenty times over a season is under far more stress than a pearl that got rinsed once.

So the useful way to think about it is not water or no water. It is: what is in the water, how long, and how many times.

Salt And Chlorine, In Order Of Damage

These are the two worst things you can put a pearl in, and chlorine is worse than salt. Chlorine is an oxidising agent. It attacks the organic binder between the nacre layers, and the result is not a dramatic crack but a slow loss of depth: the pearl stops looking wet and starts looking chalky. That change is permanent. Twenty minutes in a pool will not do it. A fortnight of daily swimming will.

Salt water is less aggressive chemically but more abrasive in practice. It is fine while you are in it and unkind once you are out, because the salt crystallises as it dries, sits in the drill hole and in every crevice of a setting, and grinds quietly with every movement. It is also hard on plated metal, which is why we wrote a whole piece on golden jewellery and the sea.

Both of them are worse on a piece that combines pearl and plated metal, because they attack two materials at once. A Twilight Pearls Choker has freshwater pearls and 24K gold-plated details on the same short length of neck. Whatever the pool does to the pearls, it is doing to the plating at the same time.

Sofia Godinho

Sunscreen, Oil And Perfume, The Quiet Ones

Here is the part almost nobody says out loud: in a southern European summer, sunscreen ruins more pearls than the sea does. Not because it is corrosive, but because it films. High factor sunscreen is dense with silicones, oils and mineral filters, and it settles into the surface of the nacre and into every join of a setting. It does not wash off with a rinse. It builds.

The visible symptom is dullness. The pearl that looked lit from inside in the shop now looks slightly matte, slightly yellow at the drill hole, and no amount of polishing brings it back, because the polishing is the other half of the problem. Body oils and hair products do the same thing more slowly. Perfume adds alcohol, which strips the surface rather than coating it.

If you take one habit from this article, take this one: sunscreen and perfume go on first, and jewellery goes on last, once the skin is dry. That single sequence protects a pair of Pearly Earrings more than any amount of avoiding water.

Sweat, And Why The Metal Suffers Before The Pearl

Sweat is acidic, and it carries salt, urea and lactic acid. On a pearl it is mildly unhelpful. On a plated finish it is the single most destructive thing in an ordinary summer day, worse than swimming, because it is constant and because it comes with friction.

This is the point almost no pearl guide reaches, and it is the object we actually sell: the pearl and the metal underneath it have opposite enemies. The pearl fears chemicals and acids and does not care much about rubbing. The plating fears rubbing and sweat and does not care much about a rinse of clean water. A piece that combines both, which is most of what you own, needs to be protected from both, and that means neither of the two standard pieces of advice is complete on its own.

In practice this means the pieces that live against skin under heat, a choker, a bracelet, take the hardest life. Earrings such as the Kiki Pearls Hoops sit away from the worst of it and tend to last noticeably longer, which is worth knowing before you decide what to wear on a thirty-five degree day.

The Thread Is The Real Weak Point

If a strung pearl piece is going to fail, it will almost never be the pearl. It will be the thread. Silk and cotton cords absorb water, and once wet they stretch and do not return. They also wick in everything the water is carrying, salt, chlorine, sunscreen, and hold it against the inside of the pearl where you cannot clean it. A cord that has been swum in twice looks tired for the rest of its life, greyish at the knots, longer than it was, slightly slack.

Adjustable pieces are the most exposed, because the sliding section takes both moisture and friction. Our Beach Pearls Necklace, with its baroque freshwater pearls on an adjustable length, is exactly the sort of piece to take to the beach and take off before you go in. The pearls would forgive you. The cord will not.

The Rule You Can Actually Follow

Pearls at the beach, yes. Pearls in the water, no. That is the whole rule, and it is more permissive than the traditional one, because it says nothing at all about sun, sand, heat or a full day of wear. Wear them on the towel, at lunch, on the walk back up. Take them off at the shoreline, along with the shower and the pool.

Around that, three small habits. Put jewellery on last, after sunscreen and perfume. At the end of a beach or pool day, pass the pieces briefly under clean fresh water and dry them properly with a soft cloth, paying attention to the drill holes and the clasp. And never, ever put anything away damp, because a closed box turns a little moisture into a lot of damage. The rest of the routine lives in our jewellery care guide.

And then be honest about the trade. Wearing a piece costs it life. Salt, sun, sweat and time will all take a little, and after two or three summers a much loved necklace will look like it has lived. That is the correct outcome. A piece kept in a drawer stays perfect and gives you nothing, which is a worse deal at any price. Choose the pieces from our pearl collection that you will actually reach for, and let them earn their wear. If you need convincing that pearls belong in daylight and in ordinary clothes rather than in a box, the evidence is in are pearls in style.