The Journal · Notes from the Bench
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The standing articles, all in one place — the metal, the bench, the stones, and how to choose and care for jewellery. Looking for the news? It lives in its own archive.
Moonstone: The Light That Floats
Some stones are valued for a colour that stays still. Moonstone is valued for a light that moves. Tilt one slowly under a single light and a soft sheen rolls across the dome, gathers, and drifts on, like light seen through thin cloud. That sheen is not polish, and it is not a coating. Moonstone…
Signets and Seals: Jewellery That Signed Your Name
Before a name could be signed, it had to be pressed. For most of history, the mark that made a document yours was not handwriting. It was a seal — and the seal you could least afford to lose was worn on your finger. The signet ring carried its owner’s design cut in reverse, sunk…
Pearls Are Not Stones: The Gemmologist’s Exception
Pearls are sold beside stones, graded beside stones, and kept in the same boxes as stones. They are not stones. A pearl is grown, not mined. Inside a living mollusc, layer after layer of nacre — microscopic platelets of calcium carbonate bound with organic matter — builds around an irritant or a nucleus. No crystal,…
Paraíba: The Tourmaline That Glows
Some coloured stones look lit from inside. Paraíba tourmaline is the clearest case — and no, it does not glow in the dark. What it does is return the light already in the room so saturated with colour that the eye reads it as a light source rather than a coloured object. The colour comes…
Paste: The Glass That Fooled Courts
In jewellery, paste means glass — lead glass, cut and set to look like a gemstone. The word now sounds cheap. In the eighteenth century, it did not. Paste was worn openly, at court, by people who owned diamonds as well. The Parisian jeweller Georges Frédéric Strass refined the glass in the 1720s, had it…
Doublets and Triplets: Stones Built in Layers
Look at a stone from the front and it can seem to be one thing. Look at it from the side and it may tell a different story. A doublet is two pieces joined and sold as one stone. A triplet is three. In an opal doublet, a thin slice of precious opal — the…
Polishing at Home: Cloth, Paste or Dip?
Three cleaners sit on the same shelf for silver, and they do not do the same thing. A polishing cloth rubs tarnish off, gently, taking a microscopic layer of metal with it. A paste rubs it off faster — and reaches into engraved lines and dark recesses a cloth would leave alone. A dip does…
Tarnish Is Not Damage
Sooner or later, someone hands over a piece of silver that has gone grey, then brown, then nearly black, and asks, with real worry in it: is it ruined? It isn’t. Tarnish is not dirt, and it is not the metal rotting. It is a film of silver sulfide at the surface — at its…
Sterling Silver, Honestly: What “925” Means, and What It Doesn’t
That little “925” stamped inside a ring or on a clasp — what does it actually promise? It promises a recipe: 925 parts pure silver out of a thousand, alloyed with 75 parts of another metal, usually copper. That alloy is sterling silver. Pure silver on its own is too soft for a piece worn…
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What sterling silver is, and how it behaves.
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Stones, examined up close.
Why pieces look the way they do.
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