material info

 

At KPD we use only the finest quality materials.

All materials including metals, gemstones and pearls are hand selected to ensure a high level of quality.

Please allow for variations in size, shape, color and texture due to the nature of gemstones, pearls and other natural materials. All sterling, fine silver and gold pieces are handcrafted leaving the work marks of the artist. Expect to see variations and imperfections in the metal. These marks are a desirable feature assuring the handmade quality. No two will ever be identical!

 

material definitions

gemstones

a gemstone or gem (also called a precious or semi-precious stone or jewel) is a piece of mineral which can be faceted cut or polished smooth and can be a bead, cabachon or a number of other styles and cuts.

pearls

A pearl is a hard object produced within the soft tissue of a living shelled mollusk, usually a conch. Just like the shell of a mollusk, a pearl is made up of calcium carbonate in minute crystalline form, which has been deposited in concentric layers. The finest quality natural pearls have been highly valued as gemstones and objects of beauty for many centuries, and because of this, the word pearl has become a metaphor for something very rare, fine, admirable, and valuable.

natural pearls

The most valuable pearls occur spontaneously in the wild, but they are extremely rare. These wild pearls are referred to as natural pearls. Natural pearls are nearly 100% calcium carbonate and conchiolin. It is thought that natural pearls form under a set of accidental conditions when a microscopic intruder or parasite enters a bivalve mollusk, and settles inside the shell. The mollusk, being irritated by the intruder, forms a pearl sac of external mantle tissue cells and secretes the calcium carbonate and conchiolin to cover the irritant. This secretion process is repeated many times, thus producing a pearl. Natural pearls come in many shapes, with perfectly round ones being comparatively rare.

 cultured pearls

Cultured or farmed pearls from pearl oysters and freshwater mussels make up the majority of those that are currently sold. Cultured pearls are the response of the shell on a tissue implant. A tiny piece of mantle tissue of a donor shell is transplanted into a recipient shell. This graft will form a pearl sac and the tissue will precipitate calcium carbonate into this pocket. There are a number of options for producing cultured pearls: use freshwater or seawater shells, transplant the graft into the mantle or into the gonad, add a spherical bead or do it non-beaded.

freshwater pearls

Freshwater and saltwater pearls may sometimes look quite similar, but they come from different sources. Freshwater pearls form in various species of freshwater mussels, family Unionidae, which live in lakes, rivers, ponds and other bodies of fresh water. Most freshwater cultured pearls sold today come from China.

saltwater pearls

Saltwater pearls grow within pearl oysters, family Pteriidae, which live in oceans. Saltwater pearl oysters are usually cultivated in protected lagoons or volcanic atolls.

sterling silver

sterling silver is an alloy containing 92.5%  by mass of silver and 7.5% by mass of other metals, usually copper.

fine silver

fine silver or “pure silver” is an alloy containing  99.9% by mass of pure silver and .5% by mass of other metals, usually copper.

gold filled

gold filled metal is composed of a solid layer of gold bonded with heat and pressure to a base metal. 

vermeil style plating

It is standard practice in Fashion Press to refer to gold plate over sterling silver as Vermeil, to distinguish it from gold plate over base metal. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) defines Vermeil as 100 micro inches (2.5 microns) of plating over sterling silver. Common fashion jewerly can have a thin wash of as little as 1 micro inch.

At KPD, we use a gem quality vermeil plating process that is 40 times as thick as most gold plated jewlery making it very durable. This process delivers a layer of 40 micro inches (1 micron) of 98.5% pure gold in 18k gold color. This thickness is extememely strong and more affordable than the 100 micro inches required by the FTC to leagally label products as Vermeil.

A fine layer of Nickel is applied between the silver and gold to prevent the silver from migrating, increasing the reliability.