Throughout her life, Queen Elizabeth II was rarely seen without her pearls. And when the royals pay their final respects to Her Majesty at her state funeral at Westminster Abbey on Monday, September 19, there is every likelihood that they will be wearing them too.
Female members of the family have already been following royal protocol carefully since the Queen passed away on September 8, dressing in black, often with a veil, and adding pearl and diamond jewelry—both significantly colorless gemstones. But why are pearls in particular the gem of choice for royal mourning? “It’s very much a tradition,” says author and jewelry historian Vivienne Becker. “It’s all about the suppression of color, and also pearls are not glittery or brash. By choosing them, you are being low-key and respectful.”
Natural pearls, formed by chance inside the shell of a mollusc, are rare miracles of nature that have fascinated humans since ancient times. The Greeks believed they were formed from the tears of the gods. In Hindu culture, pearls were associated with the moon, symbolizing wisdom and purity. In Chinese tradition, a pearl was placed in a dead person’s mouth as protection, in order to ease their journey to the afterlife. “It’s interesting how significant pearls are across world cultures. They’re a symbol of subtle elegance, and people can relate to that wherever they are from,” says designer Melanie Georgacopoulos, who specializes in pearl jewelry for her own eponymous brand, as well as in her designs for Tasaki.
During the Renaissance, given their rarity and high value, these jewels of the sea became associated with wealth and high social rank. For Queen Elizabeth I, keen to project her image as the Virgin Queen, pearls represented purity and chastity, as well as being a visual code that conveyed her extreme wealth and power.
It was not until the reign of Queen Victoria, however, that pearls became so strongly associated with mourning. She was only 42 when she lost her beloved husband, Prince Albert, in 1861 and spent the rest of her life—almost 40 years—in mourning. Thanks to her, strict rules developed around the rites of mourning. As Clare Phillips, jewelry curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, wrote in her book Jewels and Jewellery:
“The etiquette surrounding death became more complex and rigid in the course of the [19th] century... By the 1860s a widow was expected to dress in black for a year and a day after her husband’s death, wearing minimal black matte ornaments, usually of unpolished jet. Gradually she was allowed more elaborate mourning jewelry, then diamonds and pearls, and finally a return to colored stones. Some widows, following the example of Queen Victoria, never returned to more light-hearted pieces.”
Such rules are no longer strictly observed of course. Few people wear jet jewels for mourning today, and the trade in ivory—another colorless material popular in 19th-century mourning dress—is banned. Pearls, however, with their soft, subtle polish and their association with purity, are still considered an appropriate choice—even better now that, thanks to Kokichi Mikimoto’s development of the cultured pearl industry in the early 20th century, the gem is much more widely accessible.
The royal family, of course, are lucky enough to wear largely natural pearl jewelry. Queen Elizabeth herself wore them when she was mourning her father George VI after his death in February 1952. The newly crowned monarch accompanied her mother, the Queen Mother, and grandmother, Queen Mary, to meet her father’s coffin at Kings Cross station, all solemnly dressed in black, glimpses of the soft white sheen of pearls just visible beneath their veils.
Diana, Princess of Wales, later chose pearls when she attended the funeral of Princess Grace of Monaco, who herself died tragically in a car accident in 1982. Diana also chose a short necklace of large pearls when she attended Gianni Versace’s funeral after his murder in July 1997.
The Duchess of Cambridge wore another pearl necklace formerly worn by Diana for the funeral of Prince Philip in April 2021, a four-strand pearl and diamond choker by Garrard, containing pearls that were gifted to the Queen by the Japanese government in the 1970s. On 14 September, now in mourning for the Queen herself, Catherine combined funereal black with the Queen’s own Pearl and Diamond Leaf Brooch as she attended a service at Westminster Hall, held after the monarch’s coffin was conveyed from Buckingham Palace. On the same day, she paid tribute too to her late mother-in-law with a pair of the latter’s pearl and diamond earrings. Worn by Kate several times before now, they were originally a gift to Diana from Collingwood Jewellers for her wedding to Prince Charles in 1981.
At the same service, the Duchess of Sussex paired pearls with black, opting for characteristically discreet pearl and diamond studs that had been gifted to her by the Queen. She wore them at her only solo engagement with Queen Elizabeth, in June 2018.
Camilla, the Queen Consort, wore pearl earrings together with her favorite four-strand pearl necklace, and Anne, the Princess Royal, followed protocol by wearing her full Royal Navy ceremonial uniform paired with simple stud earrings. The day before however, as she accompanied her mother’s coffin on its journey from Scotland to London, Anne touchingly wore the Andrew Grima pearl earrings that were a gift from her parents in the late 1960s. That day, she paid tribute to the Queen in a moving statement in which she described how “fortunate” she felt to have been able to share “the last 24 hours of my dearest mother’s life” at Balmoral. The Princess Royal wore the same earrings also at Prince Philip’s funeral last year, a signal of her closeness to both parents.
As the royal family prepares to lay the Queen to rest, Georgacopoulos wonders whether the pairing of black dress and white pearls in mourning mirrors how a funeral combines sadness at the loss of a loved one with gratitude for the life they lived. As the world bids farewell to Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, and looks ahead to the reign of Charles, “pearls in part represent a departure that is the end of one thing but the beginning of something else.”