Jewelry costs about 15% more than it did a year ago, and it is the gold accounting for most of it. The answer coming back from the jewelry trade and brands is less gold in the piece, which changes what you have to ask for at the counter.
Lab-grown stones pushed mined diamond prices down for years. The diamond trade's price index rose again in August, led by small stones. What that changes for you.
A US trade group told its members to print synthetic instead of lab-grown, and in September the world jewelry body urged the same word internationally. The stone is the same carbon either way: what to weigh instead, and why a diamond grown out of gas is the better story.
Aryna Sabalenka played the US Open in 127 carats of colored stones and none of it looked cheap. The reason is visible in the pieces: every stone set alone in plain gold, with bare metal around it. That is a rule you can use on one ring, whatever you spend.
On a Thursday afternoon in August, two men bought tickets to the MAK in Vienna, broke a display case with a hammer, and left with a 673-diamond Van Cleef & Arpels necklace made for an Egyptian princess's wedding. What happened, what they took, and how you steal a necklace in daylight.
Jewelry was sorted by rank for five thousand years and by gender for about one century. The men's and women's split is commercial noise rather than a property of the adornment: where gendered jewelry came from, and what it should and should not change about what you buy.
Spending real money with an independent jewelry designer means trusting your own eye instead of a famous name. The used market is where that trust gets tested, because nobody pays most of retail for a secondhand piece as a favor. Seven designers pass that test on their signature pieces, and have for years.
The brooch fastened clothing for thousands of years before it became pure ornament. The history of the clasp turned decorative shows where it's headed as jewelry, plus the COVID origin of its most recent return, what recent fashion shows added, and why brooches worth buying now are waiting for you in estate sales and dusty cases.
Most jewelry quality advice starts and ends with 'is it real?' If you're buying from a reputable brand, you already know the answer is some form of yes, it's real. The harder question is whether the work is good and it's worth what you paid for it.
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