Peelers: a term applied to pearls having imperfect surfaces or skins that may have some inner layers which are perfect. Pearls having opaque bands or rings are rarely peeled with much success as this opaque layer frequently extends to some depth.
Cylindrical pearls: for pearls that have the form of a cylinder, being elongated and flattened at each end.
Hammer pearls: when pearls are long and somewhat rounded and assume the shape of a hammer or barrel. These are rounded or domed at the side and flattened at the ends.
Baroque (Wart pearls in German): when pearls are not of any perfect form such as round, pear, ovate, or any regular form, they are termed baroque, and this term covers a large class of varieties, such as all that follow (except seed- and half-pearls).
Double, triple, or twin pearls are those that are made up of two or more pearls united together in a single nacreous coating, showing, however, that they are still separate pearls.
Monster pearls: this name was formerly applied to very large, irregular, pearly masses which either resembled some animal or were adapted to form the head, trunk, or other part of an animal: these are also occasionally called “Paragons.”
Bird’s-eye: a name used for a pearl that has dull spots, giving it the appearance of a bird’s-eye.
“Ring-a-round” is a term applied to such pearls as are black, brown, pink, or white, and have a circle running around the pearl itself of some distinctive contrasting color, as white on black, pink on brown or black on white.
Embedded pearls are those that are partly or entirely surrounded by mother-of-pearl, having been enveloped and passed outward from the interior of the shell by the mollusk so that in time the pearl would have been lost on the outside of the shell. These embedded pearls are occasionally found in the manufacture of mother-of-pearl articles. When the mother-of-pearl is split, the pearl will fall out from between the layers.
Half-pearls is the name given to such pearls as are round and spherically domed, and are either somewhat flat or almost the shape of one half of a whole pearl of the same diameter. They are usually made by cutting off the best part of a hemispherical bright spot from a large irregular pearl; frequently two to four cuttings are made from the bright spots of a single pearl, each of the cuttings having the appearance of half a pearl.