page_title: Keshi pearls
section_title: Terminology
hierarchical_section_title: Keshi pearls / Terminology
caption_attribution_description: English: Necklace of flat Chinese freshwater keshi pearls
context_page_description: Keshi pearls are small non-nucleated pearls typically formed as by-products of pearl cultivation. A Japanese word also meaning "poppy", it is used in Japanese for all pearls that grew without a nucleus. Originally, keshi pearls referred to those pearls formed when a bead nucleus was rejected. More recently, keshi has been used to refer to second harvest pearls and even to freshwater non-nucleated pearls. However the later usage referring to freshwater pearls is considered erroneous by many leading gem trade associations. Because they have no nucleus, keshi pearls are composed entirely of nacre.
context_section_description: The term keshi (occasionally misspelled Keishi, apparently a confusion with "Heishi beads") was first used in Japan to refer to pearls without nuclei. Akoya pearl cultivation, which began in the 1920s in Japan, provided numerous small, most often greyish pearls as a by-product. Traders from India, where natural pearls were harvested and processed during past centuries, needed no sales talk to be convinced that they could sell Japan Akoya keshi in their market and to visiting Arabs as natural pearls, because their close similarities. Having access to Indian labor capable of sorting, drilling and stringing tiny pearls, arrangements were made to send Japanese keshi pearls to India (even during many years in which imports were not sanctioned), provide processing services at conditions without rival, and covertly retain pearls for sale in India under an allowance for pearls ruined in the course of processing.
  Pearl importers in consumer countries, and the trade associations they constitute, have recommended limiting the use of the term keshi to ocean pearls, and banning its use for freshwater pearls. This is justified to some extent by the fact that ocean pearl keshi were known as a product for some years before their freshwater counterparts. Japanese language usage of keshi certainly includes freshwater pearls. It has always been a generic term, not a trademark, and its application to freshwater pearls by the Chinese is based on visual similarity that is quite close.
  Chinese use of keshi for freshwater pearls is generally limited to those from a second (or subsequent) harvest. These differ considerably from the plump, full shapes of first-harvest freshwater pearls, which grow during a young mussel's growth period, when nacre production is at its peak. Older mussels produce nacre more slowly, and second-harvest freshwater pearls (if not nucleated) are generally flat and often thin, with concavities and texture mostly absent from first-harvest pearls. Curiously, the Chinese use keshi to differentiate between two distinct products, while Japanese usage, requiring only the absence of a nucleus, is equally applicable to both.
caption: Keshi pearl necklace
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