Wholesale Lot of 12 Cowrie Shell and Silver Bead 16 inch Long Strands.

These beads are perfect for hand crafting your own jewelry. This strand features plenty of natural character with genuine cowrie shells and rondel beads of silver tone white metal. The shells and white metal beads have been strung on this strand in an alternating fashion making it fast and easy to create your own jewelry. This is great for creating chokers, tennis bracelets, anklets or whatever you dream of. The possibilities are as endless as your imagination. These strands are each approximately 16" long. You will be getting a wholesale lot of 12. AS NECKLACES, SUGGESTED RETAIL: $9.95 TO $14.95 EACH, MAKING THIS ONE HELLOFA DEAL OVER $100.00 PROFIT

Cowrie shells were used as a form of money in China over 3000 years ago. Their uniform characteristics, durability, availability, and the fact that they can be tied and strung together for safe keeping all contributed to their acceptance as monetary currency. While beads made from varying valuable materials were functioning as the primordial form of money, they were also being used as signs of wealth, status, culture, and religion in the form of jewelry and other adornment. Although the industrial revolution changed the way we value and look at beads, their prolific use still continues today in the same ways it has for thousands of years. A single bead can be produced from plastic in a micro second for a fraction of a cent. Despite this fact, when embroidered together in the thousands by hand on a wedding dress they can increase the value of the dress exponentially, conveying the status, wealth, and individuality of the wearer just as they have in the past. It's the little things in life that sometimes give us the most pleasure and defining character. We as humans, from the earliest times, have considered the adornment of our person to be one of the necessities of life - as essential as food and shelter.