I think that this was one of my all time favourite trips to Hong Kong. It was so humid that breathing felt a bit like sucking air through a sponge at times, and too much air con made my sinuses very angry, but in terms of pearls and pearl friends, perfect.<\/p>\n
Prices were generally stable, with some silliness, especially from one company which made it very clear you can slap any old price on an item but it is only the item’s value when someone will pay it. $40k for a muddy purple strand of Edisons which weren’t even well matched? Those high priced strands weren’t even super-special. Very nice yes, rich colour, pretty clean and shiny but special…no. Grace has cut prices on a lot of stock this time around – a lot of the good colour ripple strands were really cut in price from around $1k (too high) to down to $300 which is what everyone else charges for comparable. Grace had trays and trays of the ear-wax dyed ‘gold south seas’ too- which were not selling much
\nThere were no strands of the distinctive raspberry purples like the ones I treated myself to 18 months ago. That really does seem to have been a one-off colour from that harvest (smug mode)<\/p>\n
There’s nothing new on the horizon, such as bead nucleated or souffles (very rare now though selling to India!) on the horizon. (although one wholesaler had just sold his entire stock of 20kg of souffles just before I arrived. That’s a lot of light big pearls
\nPrices are volatile: top quality prices are up while medium are down
\nBest seller for most sellers is high quality white rounds
\nSingles prices are very high
\nThere are very few large size dyed black or natural colour singles around
\nTahitian and south sea prices are falling, for less than top quality.
\nFunnily enough there is hardly any dyed coloured stock to be found. Any that is has probably been hanging around for years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I think that this was one of my all time favourite trips to Hong Kong. It was so humid that breathing felt a bit like sucking air through a sponge at times, and too much air con made my sinuses very angry, but in terms of pearls and pearl friends, perfect. Prices were generally stable, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[84,268,5,269],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pearlescence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1177"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pearlescence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pearlescence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pearlescence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pearlescence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1177"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.pearlescence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1191,"href":"https:\/\/www.pearlescence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1177\/revisions\/1191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pearlescence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pearlescence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pearlescence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}