HOW TO AUTHENTICATE VINTAGE JEWELLERY

A piece arrives. Before checking the hallmark, before anything else, I pick it up. The weight tells me something immediately — not whether it's authentic, but whether it warrants closer attention. A 1980s Chanel cuff has a particular density to it, a solidity that comes from the base metal and the thickness of the plating. Something that feels hollow or unexpectedly light gets scrutinised harder from that point on.

Most people start with documentation. That's the wrong place to start.

Documentation

Receipts and care cards help when they exist. They rarely do. When they're present, they corroborate — the era, the retailer, sometimes the original price — but they don't authenticate. A receipt proves a transaction, not a piece. I've seen convincing paperwork attached to misattributed pieces and genuine archive finds with nothing but the object itself. The object is always the primary source.

Hallmarks

Stamping systems shift across decades. If you don't know how, you misread the piece. Chanel marks from the early 1950s are simple block stamps; by the 1980s they'd become more structured, often incorporating production codes. Dior and Givenchy have their own evolutions, their own quirks of placement and depth. I check stamps against known examples and period references — not just for presence, but for how they're executed. The style of lettering, the depth of the impression, the exact position on the finding. A hallmark in the wrong location for the claimed era usually means a misdated piece rather than an outright fake, but the effect on value and accurate description is the same.

Patina

Patina is where age shows itself properly. It concentrates at friction points — the backs of pendants, the inner edges of bangles, anywhere metal meets metal repeatedly — and that distribution is hard to fake convincingly. Artificial ageing tends to be uniform in a way that genuine wear isn't. I handled a brooch recently described as unworn: the front was immaculate, but the pin housing showed decades of oxidisation inconsistent with storage alone. That internal contradiction told me more than the surface condition did. An overly clean piece with no patina at stress points is worth more suspicion, not less.

Metal Quality

Base metal composition is often the first indicator of period and provenance. Pot metal — a low-grade zinc alloy used widely in American costume jewellery through the mid-twentieth century — has a distinct density and surface quality that differs immediately from the brass used by most European houses. From there I look at the plating: colour, consistency, and where it's worn through. Better houses used heavier plate applied more evenly. Worn-through areas confirm base metal composition and often settle questions about origin that the hallmark alone leaves open.

Stones and Glass

Stones in vintage costume jewellery are almost always non-precious: glass, resin, paste, early plastics. For Chanel pieces, the glass components produced by the Gripoix atelier — the Paris-based glassmakers who supplied Chanel from the 1920s onward — were made using a poured glass technique that produces small internal bubbles. These are a feature of the manufacturing method, useful as a reference point when present, and specific to that atelier's work rather than a general property of vintage glass. Faux pearls age in a recognisable way: the coating develops an uneven lustre over decades that differs clearly from new reproduction pieces. Settings are equally informative — adhesive type, prong precision, the finish on the reverse of a stone. The back of a piece is often more revealing than the front.

Fastenings

Fastenings are where a lot of dating gets confirmed or corrected, and where misattributions most often surface. Lobster claw clasps began appearing in the mid-to-late 1980s — a piece claimed to be early 1970s with a lobster claw needs explaining. Screw-back earring findings place a piece broadly pre-1950s; clip-backs became standard through the 1950s and 1960s. I handled a brooch recently being sold as late 1960s French with a rolled-pin finding that wasn't consistent with that era or origin. The piece was genuine vintage — just wrongly dated by at least a decade. That kind of discrepancy changes the description, the price, and what a buyer is actually getting.

Pattern Recognition

After enough time with pieces from the same house or the same period, certain things register before you've consciously identified them — a proportion that's slightly off, a finish that's too even, a weight that doesn't match the visual mass. It's pattern recognition from handling originals, not instinct and not guesswork. It's also not the last word. Everything it flags gets checked against the physical evidence.

That evidence is what determines whether a piece gets listed. Most don't make it.