The old man seized Phillips by the hand and pressed something into his palm, closing his fingers tight about it; when he opened his fist a few moments later he found his palm full of grey irregular pearls.

Noses were turned up, he says, and chef after chef dismissed his product as a far cry from "the gray pearls" of the Caspian Sea and just the eggs of some toothless, goofy-looking creature that swam the Mississippi.

That could lead to an outright ban on the gray pearls.

With beady eyes the color of gray pearls, it bore a shaft that stuck up vertically from a hole in its nose.

She heard the click of the switch and turned her head away, but not before he had seen the tears glowing on her cheeks like soft grey pearls.

They glistened like light gray pearls in the chandeliered light.

The clasp on the silver wire and gray pearls long string had crusted - it was not silver like the rest of the chain.

The model Claudia Schiffer paraded on the catwalk during the show in Paris on Saturday in a torso-hugging black bustier on which the Arabic words were spelled out in gray pearls.

Ropes and strings of pearls, pink, rosy gray, and even some of jet held back the deep crimson drapes that billowed heavily before the windows.

Remind me to buy you another string of the excellent Mr Mikimoto's grey pearls.