Barrettes are part of the official uniform for childhood for just about every girl with long hair. Many girls take great pride in coordinating their barrettes with their outfits. Help them out by customizing prefab barrettes to wear and share. Buy plain barrettes at your local drug or discount store and decorate them with your [...]
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Twenty-four goldsmiths worked continuously for six years to make the finely chiselled and richly ornamented Crown of the Andes from one massive gold nugget. This splendid jewel is adorned with 453 emeralds of a total weight of 1,521 carats. Today, each carat attains a valuation price of $3,000. After a long odyssey this treasure, estimated [...]
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We find enjoyment, it is true, in the agreeable green of grass and leaves, but incomparably greater is the pleasure of beholding an emerald; for its green is the most satisfying of all,” so Pliny extolled the aristocratic chieftain of the beryl family. Nevertheless, the reader has the feeling that even Pliny, despite his telling [...]
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Seldom properly valued by laymen, but an inexhaustible source of wonderful delight to collectors, are the chrysoberyls. Little known, jealously hoarded by the earth and only yielded up in parsimonious numbers, they are assured of a prominent place among the gemstones. Their great rarity, combined with their three varieties, completely different from one another, has [...]
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The beguiling luster of this attractive gemstone—shining like damp moss in autumn sunshine—earned peridot the sobriquet of “green gold.” In earlier times it was readily linked with the sun, of whose bright rays it was said to be the keeper and therefore alleged to be a shield against the threat of eclipse and blindness of [...]
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Agate—diversely beautiful, multicolored, and variously formed as it is, its endless abundance of abstract designs can only be hinted at by the descriptions “spotted, cloudy, marbled, banded, or dappled.” To the ancient Greeks and Romans it was already known in the form of colored pebbles collected from the Achates River in Sicily.
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During the Flower Power era, the renewed interest in Asia and the Far East led to a return to natural materials such as bone, ivory and Indian metalwork. Western jewelers were influenced by the varied assortment of goods being imported from Asia, and leather thong jewelry hung with dyed feathers and wooden beads typified the [...]
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In the past, the jewelry trade had usually lagged behind the fashion industry by as much as 10 or 15 years. However, this time lag had begun decreasing with the introduction of mass-produced jewelry in the twenties and thirties, and by the end of the Second World War the jewelry trade was able to respond [...]
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The interest of the couturiers in costume jewelry had been initiated by Paul Poiret before the war, when he produced theatrical jewelry for Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe. The bold, vivid Eastern silhouettes associated with this influential ballet were in stark contrast to the Art Nouveau styles of the time. Poiret later developed his range of costume [...]
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Very quickly novelty and trinket manufacturers began to produce copies of couturier costume pieces, which developed the market for fashion jewelry. America, in particular, was well placed to apply the new manufacturing techniques to the jewelry field, and where Paris had led the trend for costume jewelry, it was America that chiefly propagated it. Less [...]
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