If you follow some antique jewellery dealers on Instagram, you’re likely to get tons of ads for “sustainable” jewellery. The reasoning behind the marketing seems to be that they use very little gold and synthetic […]
Nobody wants to be fooled, but it is easy to be fooled by perceived antiques. A piece of jewellery may be made in the style of Art Nouveau, it may be a reproduction intended to […]
If you’ve ever laid your eyes upon a beautiful piece of jewellery made of a large quantity of tiny Bohemian garnets set in a brownish metal, you’ve seen tombac. Tombac (also written “tombak” ) is […]
Lead can be present in most if not all older alloys (including gold!), as people in ye olden days simply didn’t know how dangerous it was. Old paste jewellery will also contain lead (just like […]
If the diamond is the queen of the gemstones, corundum is her consort. A red corundum is known as a ruby, and while sapphires are mostly associated with a particular deep blue colour, all non-red […]
When does an antique piece of jewellery stop being an antique? This is, I believe, a question with no absolute answer. I would, however, suggest that an item that is no longer what it once […]
“Antique” is a word that is just as easily defined as it is misunderstood and abused. You don’t have to spend much time on auction websites to know that anything and everything can seemingly be […]
