$4+ Million Pearl Necklace

$4.7 Million Pearl Necklace

One figure, however, stands out among the rest. “The day before the wedding,” Fitzgerald writes of Tom, “he bought her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.” Tom and Daisy were married in 1919. Adjusted for almost a century of inflation $350,000 equals around $4.7 million.

Rahul Kadakia, head of the jewelry department at Christie’s, wrote in an email that such a necklace could be worth between $7 million and $10 million today. The price jump is because natural saltwater pearls were common in the 1920s when high end jewelers would travel to the Bahrain to pull them out of the Gulf. Today the Bahrain coast is no longer filled with pearls, and such necklaces are harder to come by.

“For $350,000,” Kadakia wrote of the current market, “you could buy a very pretty natural pearl necklace, but dollar for dollar it would not compare in size and quality to the same purchase back in the 20’s.”

Earlier in May a single strand of natural pearls (pictured above) sold at auction in Geneva for nearly $8.5 million setting a world auction record. Last month in New York, a three-strand pearl necklace (top) sold for $1.1 million on a $1 million to $1.5 million estimate.

Read entire article on $4.7 million dollar necklace here.