I just got these for Christmas. The Pearls are beautiful and come in 7 rich colors. I loved them immediately. The problem was when I went to take the sticky tag off of one of them, the whole strand broke. Luckily, I have six more, but I'm very scared to stretch them very much now. The rubber bands the pearls are on are not a very heavy gauge and they break with moderate stretching. I'm thinking of taking the pearls from the broken strand and having them put on a stronger band.