About

Why this exists

I like pearls. Finding pearl jewelry I actually wanted to wear turned out to be much harder.

The good stuff is expensive, and most of it seems designed to be inherited rather than worn — safe settings, formal shapes, the kind of thing that lives in a box and comes out twice a year. Go cheaper and the design gets generic and the quality follows it down. Somewhere in between there was supposed to be pearl jewelry that looked like now, held up to daily wear, and didn't require a special occasion to justify. I couldn't find it.

So I started selecting it myself.

About the pearls

Most of the pearl trade is organised around sameness. Pearls get graded, matched and sorted until every bead in a strand is a twin of the one beside it. The ones that won't cooperate — lopsided, ridged, dented, grown into shapes nobody planned — get set aside.

Those are baroque pearls, and they're the ones I look for.

A baroque pearl can't be reproduced. Order the same ring twice and you won't get the same pearl. I can't promise you consistency. What I can promise is that nobody else has yours.

How it works

Rings, earrings, necklaces and bracelets. Gold-tone and silver-tone. Small runs, chosen a piece at a time rather than ordered by the case. When something sells out it may return — but not with the same pearl, because there isn't another one.

Modingo has been in Atlanta since 2020. I choose every piece and I answer every email. If something arrives wrong, you're writing to a person.