News

Plenty of people ask us to solder their engagement ring and wedding band into one piece. It is a reasonable request with a real upside. It also involves putting a torch near stones that may not survive it, so the honest answer depends almost entirely on what is set in your rings. Why people do it Two rings on one finger rub against each other constantly. Over years that wears flat spots into both bands, usually where the engagement ring's gallery meets the wedding band. Joining them stops that. It also fixes rotation. An engagement ring with a heavy head...

Enamel on jewellery is glass. Not paint, not lacquer, not coloured coating: powdered glass fused onto metal in a kiln. The V&A describes enamelling as a technique in which coloured glass is fused to a metal base in the heat of a kiln to create glossy, vividly coloured metal objects. Once you know that, everything else about enamel jewellery follows: why the colour never fades, why it chips instead of scratching, and why a sudden temperature change is the thing most likely to ruin it. How Hot, and Why It Matters Thompson Enamel, a manufacturer of the material, states that...

If your ring is tight in the morning and loose by evening, your hands are behaving exactly as measured. This is one of the few areas of jewellery where there is real published data instead of shop folklore, and the numbers are larger than most people expect. The measured daily swing A study from the Rothman Institute at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital enrolled 36 healthy adult volunteers with no active hand pathology, measuring hand volume at 8am, 2pm and 8pm across three consecutive days by water displacement. Hand volume fell 2.7 percent, or 13.11 mL, from morning to afternoon, then...

In Canada, the lowest quality that may legally carry a gold quality mark is 9 karat. That is set out in the Precious Metals Marking Regulations, and the Competition Bureau states it plainly: to carry a quality mark, gold items must have a minimum quality of 9K and a maximum quality of 24K. It is a genuinely useful fact when you are comparing pieces, because 9k is sold here legitimately and a lot of buyers have never encountered it. Here is what each karat actually contains, what the law requires of the stamp, and how to choose for the way...

The back is the part of an earring nobody thinks about until a diamond stud is gone. Every style holds the earring on by a different mechanism, and the mechanism decides how it fails. Worth ten minutes before you put something valuable in your ears. Butterfly, the default nobody chooses The friction back, also called a butterfly or push back, is what most earrings ship with. A flexible ear nut slides over the post and grips it. That is the whole system. Nothing locks. It stays on because the metal squeezes the post. The failure mode follows directly. Squeeze a...

Two rings can hold the same stone in the same metal and sell for very different money, and the gap is usually in the metalwork you have to lean in to see. Milgrain, filigree and hand engraving are the three decorative techniques that show up most often on jewellery brought into our Coquitlam bench, and they are the three most often confused with each other. This is what each one actually is, how it is made, and what it means for wear and repair. Milgrain: The Row of Tiny Beads Milgrain is the line of minute beads running along an...