Jewelry Lovers

Brooches of the Twentieth Century
Platinum became a popular jewellery material in the early 1900s. The Edwardian used its pale colour to offset delicate shapes and the light hues of diamonds, pearls, peridots and aquamarines. In the early 1920s Cartier set jewellery with carved coloured gems to create a multicoloured effect often described as ‘fruit salad’. [...]

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Jewellery has been used for personal adornment, at least among the upper classes, for centuries. Styles and types have always gone in and out of vogue, leaving modern collectors with an enormous variety from which to choose.
The value of jewellry depends on several factors, ranging from the current fashions to the precious metals and gemstones [...]

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Jewellery made to symbolise or commemorate a person or event rather than simply to adorn is of historical interest and is often comparatively cheap.
Most early jewellery - and many pieces produced right up to the 20th century — served more than merely decorative purposes, embodying some theme, device or message in its design. Such jewellery [...]

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Many people jump into the process of making jewelry and take shortcuts that only hurt them in the long run. Maybe they buy tools and supplies that don’t give them the results they’re looking for. Or they don’t treat their new tools right. Or perhaps they’re worried that their great new “original” design will make [...]

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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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The collective name garnet embraces a large mineral group whose members each have their own individual names corresponding to their appearance. This family provides a good example of the fact that though the structure of a mineral determines its external form (garnets crystallize throughout in the cubic system), it is the chemical composition which is [...]

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For the first time we encounter in this delicate, virginal gem, a gemstone from the ranks of the rock-forming feldspars. Taken all together as a group, the feldspars are the most widely distributed mineral association. Their chemical composition divides them into three different combinations of calcium, sodium, and potassium coupled with alumina and silica, all [...]

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A few years ago a hitherto unknown and unusually interesting occurrence was discovered in Tanzania supplying green, so-called prase, opal, which owes its color to a small nickel content derived from weathered serpentine. Since the opal here, as in all the other localities, crops out relatively near the earth’s surface in fairly easily workable rocks, [...]

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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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