Pearls will be a rare commodity that you can find while searching the Animal Crossing: New Horizons sea. You need these items to craft the particular craft items in the game, and they're a bit hard to find. There are two ways to locate them, and unfortunately both methods are a bit difficult and time consuming, so you find yourself spending quite a bit of time trying to locate them while swimming around your island.
The first method is to receive them from Pascal, a red otter that you can interact with once a day when you get a scallop. It will be a random drop, however. Traditionally, Pascal brings you one of the rarest Mermaid items you can find in the Summer Update, which means you're missing out on something when you receive a pearl. However, due to the other method of supposedly locating a pearl, this could be a decent alternative. Keep in mind that Pascal only spawns once per day, so if you want him to appear multiple times you'll want to time travel.
The other way to earn pearls is to dive into the ocean when you see bubbles. A pearl is one random occurrence among the many that you can find in the ocean, so you won't always find it while diving, and we can't seem to find a sure way to determine if a black dot is on the ocean floor. is a pearl or not. You may find yourself looking for them and searching for them only to exchange a scallop to Pascal to receive your first pearl.
Once you have your pearl, you can take it to your workbench to create any of the available items that you want to add to your island to give it a summer theme.
