By Eytan Brandes
Located in Sherman Oaks, CA
These new earrings -- one-offs by Eytan Brandes -- feature ten gorgeous little keshi pearls. "Keshi" is frequently (and incorrectly) used to describe freshwater rice pearls, but keshi pearls are actually cultured pearls that are not nucleated. They happen as happy mistakes in pearl farms when oysters or mollusks create little lumps of pure nacre instead of building the nacre around a bead nucleus (fun fact: almost always made from American mother of pearl) inserted by the farmer. Most keshi pearls are very small, very color-saturated, and very lustrous.
The pearls we used for these earrings are from Seven Seas Pearls, our trusted pearl dealer going back decades. Seven Seas deals only with saltwater pearls -- South Sea, Tahitian and Akoya. No freshwater and nothing from China. Seven Seas keeps a sizable inventory of genuine keshi pearls (mostly for its non-American clients), so we had the privilege of choosing from a wide array of these miraculous little nuggets.
The two rich gold keshis on our earrings are from South Sea (Australian) mollusks -- no other mollusk produces that gold color. The other keshis are Tahitian, with a range of colors including snow white (very rare for Tahitian pearls), black, dark green and aubergine. As you can see, the pearls are all different shapes and sizes, but they're mostly in the 3mm - 3.5mm range (width, not depth).
So what about the garnets? Well, they happened more or less by accident. We cast the rectangular frames for a client's custom piece, but we got the dimensions wrong and didn't realize it until they came back from the caster. (The classic Centimeters vs. Inches Misunderstanding strikes again.). Rather than melting them, we found some pretty rectangular garnet cabochons that fit just right, then made them into the gemstone terminals for our keshi earrings...
Category
2010s American Contemporary Dangle Earrings
MaterialsGarnet, Pearl, Black Pearl, Cultured Pearl, South Sea Pearl, Gold, 14k G...