Category: Guide & Tips

Tips For Making Bracelets

Creating bracelets is fun.
If this is your hobby, then its time to make it more interesting.
The bracelet making and maintaining tips follows
1.Decide how many links you want to use in making your bracelet. Although it is easy both to add and remove the links even after you make your bracelet its better if you plan [...]

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Diamond Wedding Ring Guide: No Nonsense Guide For Choosing Your Ring

One activity that you will undoubtedly appreciate when preparing for your wedding ceremony is the wedding ring selection. Like most young girls, you have probably spent most of your life dreaming of the perfect diamond wedding ring. Hopefully, you and your fiance have decided to shop for rings together, or you have informed him of what you like. You will wear the wedding ring for a significant amount of time and it only makes sense that it’s something that you like. If your knowledge of diamond wedding rings is limited to size, it’s a good idea that you obtain more information before you make your wedding ring selection.

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New Jewelry Designs by Michelle Trachtenberg for Coach

New cutting edge jewelry line from Coach will have them all standing in line. We love these new jewelry designs!

News & Trends: Michelle Trachtenberg may be one of Hollywood’s hardest working actresses. The star of Gossip Girl and Mercy has teamed up with Poppy from Coach to create her first jewelry collection.

The Michelle Trachtenberg for Poppy collection is as multi-faceted as Michelle’s roles, combining pretty gemstones with chunky hardware. Poppy describes the look as “confident yet romantic, rockin’ yet refined.”

The collection is filled with colorful Swarovski crystals handset in Coach’s signature hardware.

Each item is a statement in itself including rings, earrings, chunky multi-strand necklaces and cuff-style bracelets.

Personally, I love the Jackie O pearls meets Mr. T, “Pearl and Chain Necklace” combo that perfectly reflects a hardcore girly-girl.

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Fun Ways to Wear Your Jewelry

As with everything else in life, sometimes we fall into habits in how we wear our jewelry. We put the brooch on out left shoulder, we wear the same necklace with the same dress and the same earrings.

This article will help stimulate your thinking about how you wear jewelry. It’s not exhaustive — if you have other ideas of better ways to use jewelry, let me know. Pins are perhaps the most versatile of jewelry. In addition to the usual shoulder or lapel, they are often worn with scarves. Try these other ways of wearing your pins to extend your jewelry vocabulary.

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Pearl Grading: A No-Nonsense Guide to Pearls

Thanks to aggressive publicity campaigns sponsored by the diamond industry, anyone buying a diamond can confidently go into the transaction armed with enough information to ask the right questions. In the pre-purchase stage, you’ll likely query the seller about the five C’s: carat, cut, clarity, color and cost. As long as you trust the jeweler, you can be confident about the value of the gem you’re interested in based on his or her answers. But what about pearls? What questions do you ask? What does a high quality pearl look like? What are traits to avoid? Here we’ll tell you what makes a pearl valuable. We’ll also give you questions to ask your jeweler and tools to judge these lustrous gems yourself.

Pearl Value Factors

While there is no international standard for grading pearls, there is a system that is commonly used to evaluate these beautiful colored gemstones. Developed by the Gemological Institute of America (GIA), the world’s largest non-profit institute of gemological research and learning, this grading system considers seven pearl traits when determining value. They are: size, shape, color, luster, surface quality, nacre quality, and matching. Let’s take a look at each one as it relates to the beautiful cultured pearl.

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Do You Have Enough Jewelry Insurance?

Jewelry insurance comes in many forms and varieties and only an insurance agent can provide accurate and specific advice. However, it helps to know enough about jewelry insurance to ask your agent the right questions and to be aware of how the process works. The time to ask your insurance agent the questions is before you insure an item, not when you need to file a claim. Read the fine print in your insurance contract to be sure it provides the coverage you expect.

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Keep Your Jewelry Clean And Sparkling Throughout The Year

Everybody, especially women, loves jewelry. It’s an accessory that one cannot simply do without. However, people are hard-pressed to keep it clean and sparkling. You can of course take the help of a professional jewelry cleaner, but these can be pretty expensive.

There are numerous ways and means thorough which you can keep your jewelry in ship shape throughout the year. What’s more you can employ these methods from the comforts of your home. They are easy to do, and easy to learn. Here are a few tips on keeping your jewelry clean and sparkling throughout the year:
Cleaning Your Precious Diamonds

The process is quite simple. Take a glass bowl, and pour some Vodka into it. Take your diamond jewelry and swish it inside the bowl. Take it out and then rinse it with clean, clear water and wipe it dry with a soft cloth. Moreover, if your diamond jewelry is really very dirty, then it is advisable that you dip a soft toothbrush in the vodka and scrub the jewelry delicately. This process will clean and add the requisite sparkle to the diamond jewelry in no time at all.

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Diamond Education

A all inclusive guide to understanding diamonds. Understand what is on the diamond certificate. How two diamonds of the same size, color and clarity can vary in price by 35%! Both visual and detailed explanations of a diamond’s size, color, clarity and cut, and how each of these factors independently influence prices!

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Increase Your Retail Cultured Pearl Jewelry Sales with Dazzling Displays

When selling any type of jewelry, be it bridal or cultured pearls, your displays make all the difference in how well your items sell. Customers are often drawn to those dazzling jewelry displays that offer shimmering lights and vibrant colors. Different types of pearl jewelry can be displayed in such ways to attract the eyes of customers. Use the jewelry display tips below to increase cultured pearl sales in your retail store.

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Handcrafting Jewelry Boxes – Are you Truely Committed to Quality?

Quality has become a meaningless word in today’s marketplace, but genuine quality still exists. From the rigorous process of selecting the perfect materials to the strict attention to the finest detail of functional design, find out exactly what defines true quality hand crafting.

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‘Are All Tahitian Pearls Black?’ and Other Pearl FAQ Answers

Are all Tahitian pearls black? What’s the difference between a cultured pearl and a natural pearl? Are freshwater pearls inferior to saltwater pearls? Are South Sea pearls really golden?

Good questions. With all the different pearl colors and types out there, it can be difficult to know just what you’re looking at. For those interested in buying pearls, or for gem enthusiasts who wish to learn more, here are answers to some of the most commonly asked questions about pearls.

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Tanzanite: How to purchase on the Internet

You want to know what to look for when making a loose tanzanite or gemstone purchase? A little guidance and knowledge will help you avoid the common pitfalls when making your next purchase.

So…you’ve been looking to purchase a quality tanzanite on the internet and you need some help determining what characteristics you should be looking for in a quality gem. This article is intended as a resource to help guide you through a successful tanzanite purchase by avoiding many of the common pitfalls that some consumers become entangled. These pitfalls can often leave a sour taste in your mouth and make you a little head-shy about purchasing tanzanite online.

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Titanium Jewelry Myths

To many people, titanium is a mysterious term. Titanium jewelry: General understanding of the public for this metal is that it is a very hard substance, and some may know that is very light as well, especially for folks who own any titanium jewelry or watches. We would like to clarify some common myths about this metal and give brief explanation for each one.

Titanium is a newly found metal
Titanium is new to many industries and recently applied to many new applications, but the metal was first discovered in 1791, in England. It was discovered by an amateur chemist in an impure form called rutile. It was not used widely until the last century because the technique for extracting titanium from its naturally occurred ore remained a failure until 1910. It was used in many applications after it was shown that its alloys can be produced commercially by reducing titanium tetrachloride with magnesium in 1940.

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Yellow Diamonds Are First Choice for the Fashion Savvy

Treasured, rare and always adding sparkle into our lives, diamonds will never fall out of fashion. Life’s most endearing moments – engagements, birthdays and anniversaries – are celebrated with diamonds. But most people believe that a diamond with color is an inferior jewel. Not so, according to many classic jewelry designers. On the contrary, colored diamonds are some of the most precious stones around.

Jennifer Lopez’s 6-carat fancy pink engagement ring and Paris Hilton’s 24-carat, $5 million fancy yellow engagement ring are credited with bringing colored diamonds back into the spotlight.

Like Hilton and Lopez, many women yearn to set themselves apart from everyone else. The rarity of fancy yellow diamonds – only 2 percent to 3 percent of diamonds mined in the world are considered “fancy yellow” – makes them popular among women who want to make a statement with their stones.

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Using a jeweler’s loupe

Many people have their own jeweler’s loupe these days and love to look at their jewelry with it. Unfortunately not everyone is taught how to use a loupe properly. Using a loupe is not terribly difficult, but using it properly can really help you examine your own jewelry for identifying characteristics, cracks, chips, or other damage without having to run to the jeweler every time to smack your ring on something hard. Before we look at how to use a loupe though, I would like to explain some of the characteristics of loupes so that you can select a quality magnifier for your own use.

Selecting a loupe:
The first thing to look at is the magnification. Loupes can be found with 2x magnification up to 30x, or even more, magnification. For our purposes it is best to use a 10x loupe since this is the magnification that is used by the gem grading labs to grade diamonds. Less magnification may not show enough detail, while more magnification may give you an unrealistic expectation.

The next thing to look at is the number of lenses a loupe has. The inexpensive loupes tend to have a single lens. These are fine for casual use, but may introduce focus and clarity issues. A triplet loupe has three lenses that correct your magnification to present the clearest possible view and help correct any color issues that may be introduced by reflected light.

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Costco: Quality Jewelry?

This post will address most questions many people have about buying jewelry at Costco. If you have never thought about buying a piece of jewelry from Costco, well you better think again!

Before we answer the jewelry question, we need to explain the Costco Model. This recession may really challenge Costco’s business model. The company has built itself around being the upscale warehouser–paying premium wages to its workers, while carrying premium products. You really don’t want to be the high-cost provider in a deflationary environment–at least, not as long as wages remain sticky. It’s also less broadly distributed, centering itself near relatively affluent areas. In most cases, that’s a good place to be. But so far, the recession has taken a disproportionate toll on those with substantial assets. Regardless, Costco continues with a very standard markup structure ranging from 20-30%. How can Costco survive at 20-30% markup? Simple, they make a huge profit on the membership fees. The 20-30% markup on merchandise basically covers about 100% of their fixed costs, the rest including the membership fees is all profit.

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World’s Most Expensive Christmas Ornament

The holidays are coming up and the UK’s Hallmark Jewelers are ringing in the season with the most expensive Christmas ornament in the world.

Adorned with 500 diamonds—three of them one carat apiece—arranged along a snowflake pattern and orbited by 188 rubies, The World’s Most Valuable Christmas Bauble, as they call it, is a truly exquisite and unique piece of holiday décor.

Work on the Bauble began on Boxing Day (December 26th, for stateside readers) 2008 and took almost a year to complete. The two halves of the interior orb were cast in London’s Hatton Garden Jewellery Quarter. The bulb was unveiled at a VIP gala and its designer, Mark Hussey, plans to display it in his Titchfield store should a buyer not be available.

The Christmas Bauble is valued at £82,000—over US $136,000.

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Make The Magic of Christmas Day Last FOREVER

An ideal gift that you can give or receive on Christmas day has to be a token that holds affectionate meanings, and that being is a piece of ornate Jewelry. Jewelry can denote many things as in i.e. will you be my friend wife/husband or thank you for just being who you are.

Occasions are to numerous to mention for the giving of Jewelry.

Slippers become a habitual buy for dad, chocolates for mum are fattening, flowers die clothes fade, plus the entire above mentioned have a sell by date. So after they have gone that Christmas is forgotten. By giving the right gift then memories are forever.

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Gold Earrings – Important Facts

One thing you can say about gold earrings is that they are timeless pieces that are always in style. They are not only beautiful, but also wear-friendly since, unlike sterling silver, they don’t tarnish. Another great attribute is that people with allergies to certain metals, or find they have a problem with staining from metals that have been combined with gold, don’t have a problem with gold itself.

Gold is a versatile metal, able to be worked in virtually any shape, whether it be small, but sturdy, strands to thin sheets. In fact, just one ounce has the ability to be hammered into an extremely thin sheet measuring at ten feet square. Artisans, especially makers of gold earrings, can manipulate gold into any desired shape.

When choosing gold earrings you need to look at the gold’s karat factor. Different karat numbers are what describe just how much pure gold is in the earrings. The percentage of gold in the earrings is higher when the karat number is higher.

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Spilling the Beads—Long Necklaces with the Season’s Blouses

Adornment around the neck continues as the key trend in jewelry this season, the easiest way to update a look. Moreover, in these economic times, shoppers want value for their money, so the more versatility that can be wrung from a single item of jewelry, the more its perceived value. The result is that a single necklace or a single combination of necklaces is often burdened with the task of updating many ensembles in a wardrobe.

A necklace, more than any other item of jewelry, needs to be chosen with consideration of the garments with which it will be worn. Almost any necklace, long or short, complex or simple, can work with a simple sheath dress, a garment that lives for adornment. But with the cooler weather arrive styles of garments that are not as forgiving in their requirements.

One of the trickiest of such garments is the blouse. Created from a soft, even fluid, fabric such as silk, a blouse is too fragile to support the weight of a brooch, let alone recover from the puncture marks it would cause. Long (or long-ish) sleeves limit the number of bracelets that can be worn. And thus the necklace becomes the adornment of choice.

Jewel-neck blouses, like sheath dresses, love adornment. So long as the necklace(s) are visually dominant over the short neckline of such a blouse, any style necklace, long or short, works well. When a jewel-neck blouse is layered under a blazer or jacket, that third piece will guide the placement of a necklace.

Blouses with collars, ruffles and button fronts are much trickier to adorn with necklaces, and several recent items in the fashion magazines demonstrate this point.

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Jewelry References

  • Jewelry Information Center (JIC) Jewelry Information Center (JIC) is the public relations arm of the fine jewelry and watch industries. Founded as a non-profit trade association in 1946 in New York City, JIC is funded by its members (nearly 1,000 manufacturers, designers, and retailers o Jewelry Information Center (JIC) is the public relations arm of the fine jewelry and watch industries. Founded as a non-profit trade association in 1946 in New York City, JIC is funded by its members (nearly 1,000 manufacturers, designers, and retailers o
  • Fashion Conversations
  • AGS Laboratories AGS Laboratories is the world’s premier diamond grading laboratory for diamond cut, the first diamond laboratory to offer a diamond cut grade based on proven science and the first laboratory to offer cut grading for fancy shapes including princess, emeral AGS Laboratories is the world’s premier diamond grading laboratory for diamond cut, the first diamond laboratory to offer a diamond cut grade based on proven science and the first laboratory to offer cut grading for fancy shapes including princess, emeral
  • Cultured Pearl Association of America The Cultured Pearl Association of America, Inc is a non profit group founded in 1957, comprised of the finest manufacturers, wholesalers, dealers and suppliers of Cultured Pearls in the United States.  Our intention is to “cultivate” awareness, interest, The Cultured Pearl Association of America, Inc is a non profit group founded in 1957, comprised of the finest manufacturers, wholesalers, dealers and suppliers of Cultured Pearls in the United States. Our intention is to “cultivate” awareness, interest,
  • American Gem Labs (AGL) American Gemological Laboratories (AGL) is an international gemstone testing facility specializing in comprehensive colored gemstone analysis. AGL provides identification reports, detailed enhancement reports, country-of-origin or provenance reports, as w American Gemological Laboratories (AGL) is an international gemstone testing facility specializing in comprehensive colored gemstone analysis. AGL provides identification reports, detailed enhancement reports, country-of-origin or provenance reports, as w
  • The World Jewellery Confederation CIBJO is an international confederation of national jewelery trade organizations. CIBJO’s purpose is to encourage harmonization, promote international cooperation in the jewelery industry, and to consider issues which concern the trade worldwide. CIBJO is an international confederation of national jewelery trade organizations. CIBJO’s purpose is to encourage harmonization, promote international cooperation in the jewelery industry, and to consider issues which concern the trade worldwide.
  • AGTA Gem Industry Guide The AGTA is recognized within the jewelry trade as the authoritative source on natural colored gemstones: “The voice of the natural colored gemstone, pearl and cultured pearl industries.” The AGTA is recognized within the jewelry trade as the authoritative source on natural colored gemstones: “The voice of the natural colored gemstone, pearl and cultured pearl industries.”
  • Gemological Institute of America (GIA) Established in 1931, GIA is the world’s largest and most respected nonprofit institute of gemological research and learning.  GIA discovers (through GIA Research), imparts (through GIA Education), and applies (through the GIA Laboratory and GIA Instrument Established in 1931, GIA is the world’s largest and most respected nonprofit institute of gemological research and learning. GIA discovers (through GIA Research), imparts (through GIA Education), and applies (through the GIA Laboratory and GIA Instrument
  • Platinum Guild International The Platinum Guild International is the official website for platinum jewelry; offering advice and information, design inspiration, and where to find a recommended platinum retailer in your area. The site is brought to you by Platinum Guild International, The Platinum Guild International is the official website for platinum jewelry; offering advice and information, design inspiration, and where to find a recommended platinum retailer in your area. The site is brought to you by Platinum Guild International,
  • The Silver Institute The Silver Institute is a nonprofit international association that draws its membership from across the breadth of the silver industry. This includes leading silver mining houses, refiners, bullion suppliers, manufacturers of silver products and wholesale The Silver Institute is a nonprofit international association that draws its membership from across the breadth of the silver industry. This includes leading silver mining houses, refiners, bullion suppliers, manufacturers of silver products and wholesale
  • World Gold Council Founded in 1987, the World Gold Council is an organization formed and funded by the world’s leading gold mining companies with the aim of stimulating and maximising the demand for, and holding of Gold. Founded in 1987, the World Gold Council is an organization formed and funded by the world’s leading gold mining companies with the aim of stimulating and maximising the demand for, and holding of Gold.

Jewelry Titans

  • Tiffany & Company The year was 1837. Charles Lewis Tiffany and his schoolmate John Young traveled from New England to New York City with an idea and a dream that were to become Tiffany & Co. While the first day of business brought a mere four dollars and 98 cents, the The year was 1837. Charles Lewis Tiffany and his schoolmate John Young traveled from New England to New York City with an idea and a dream that were to become Tiffany & Co. While the first day of business brought a mere four dollars and 98 cents, the
  • Harry Winston Harry Winston always possessed a gift; he had an eye for the best gemstones and a nose for what the customer wanted. Winston is still known for exquisite jewelry. His name is still linked to some of the most beautiful jewels and settings in the world. Harry Winston always possessed a gift; he had an eye for the best gemstones and a nose for what the customer wanted. Winston is still known for exquisite jewelry. His name is still linked to some of the most beautiful jewels and settings in the world.
  • Cartier Louis Francois Cartier the son of a powder horn maker, founded Cartier in 1847; the year his workshop master Adolphe Picard died. Cartier would take over Maitre Picard’s Jewelry shop located at 31 Rue Montorgueil, Paris. Louis Francois Cartier the son of a powder horn maker, founded Cartier in 1847; the year his workshop master Adolphe Picard died. Cartier would take over Maitre Picard’s Jewelry shop located at 31 Rue Montorgueil, Paris.

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