Blue Grey Pearls? What kind are these?

[Jketels]

Help, please. These are from an estate and I would guess are from the 1950-60's.
I think they are so amazing but I don't know anything about them. Can anyone help?

 

[CortezPearls]

Hello Jketels and welcome back!
Without complete certainty and given your period estimate...I believe those are dyed baroque Akoyas. My mom used to have some very similar to those, a gift from my dad back in the 1970's.
They look quite Cool!

 

[Jketels]

Thank you Douglas. If they were dyed wouldn't they all be the same color? That's what is stumping me. The clasp is clearly vintage I've uploaded a photo but the earrings are pierced on 14k post so those look newer.

 

[CortezPearls]

Indeed. They would have been of a uniform color...but those old dyes were less high-tech than today's and some would fade-away, leaving the pearls with different colors (because, they all had different colors to start with).
This is what happened to my mom's pearls too.
I also have these dyed freshwater pearls I was given by a customer, they are from the 1980's (she told me this) and they had a mostly uniform color in the late 1990's...but now they've gone to a mostly grayish color with some blue in them, similar to what I'm seeing in your necklace.
The earrings could be from a different source altoghether.

 

[jshepherd]

Douglas is spot on. They look like dyed baroque akoya. The earrings could be natural-color baroque akoya.

 

[CortezPearls]

I was looking for the photos...and I have so many I could not find them...but just did.
Here is a photo of the pearls back in the late 1990's...sorry that the image quality back then was so...baaad:

Then back in 2007 I took some new photos of the same pearls...

It was strand, the pearls were separated...so not the very same pearls. Some changed dramatically, others retained their overall look...these were the worse ones. And you can see they all look different.

 

[KarinK]

If any pearls came naturally in that kind of blue, everyone would want them They do look pretty. I've been through two attempts of buying a strand of blue akoya. They are much more silver than blue. Even the best that I've seen here do not have that deep blue. Instead the best have a combination of blue with pink flashes.

 

[CortezPearls]

Totally...by the way...I just got news of Cultured Abalone Pearls! And there might be some true-blues there!