Is My Grandmother's Costume Jewelry Worth Anything?

Almost every family has one: a box of glittering brooches, beads and clip earrings that nobody quite knows what to do with. Is it all "just costume"? Or is there something special in there?

The honest answer is that most costume jewelry is pretty, well made and worth modest money. Some of it is worth a good deal more. In this guide I'll show you how to start telling the two apart, beginning with the back of the piece.

Turn it over: signed makers to look for

Collectors judge a brooch by its back. Take a 10× loupe and look near the pin, along the edges, on the clasp, on earring clips, and on any little oval or rectangular plaque. Tilt the piece: stamped letters often appear only when light hits them sideways.

A few of the names worth knowing, and how their marks help date a piece:

• Trifari used KTF from the mid-1920s to about 1930. A little crown over the T appeared from about 1937 (some references say 1939), and was dropped in the 1970s.
• Miriam Haskell pieces were not marked before about 1947. According to Antique Trader, a horseshoe-shaped mark was used from 1948 for a couple of years, then an oval plaque reading "Miriam Haskell."
• Coro made everything from dime-store pins to fine brooches. Its better line, Corocraft, often carries a small winged horse, and its Duette is two clips that slide into one frame to make a brooch.
• Monet marked pieces "Monét," with an accent, from 1937 to the mid-1940s.
• Joseff of Hollywood used block letters in the late 1930s and 1940s, and a script mark from the 1950s.

Two cautions. A famous name can be faked, or belong to someone else. A script "Chanel" mark from 1941, used by an American firm called Reinad, has nothing to do with the House of Chanel in Paris. And unsigned is not the same as worthless: early Haskell, for one, carried no mark at all.

What a © or a patent number tells you

The little © sign beside a maker's name comes from two court cases. On March 8, 1954, in Mazer v. Stein, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a work of art doesn't lose copyright just because it's part of a useful object. On September 28, 1955, a federal court in New York treated Trifari's jewelry designs as copyrightable works of art. After that, makers began adding the ©.

So collectors use a rule of thumb: a © next to the maker's name usually means the piece was made after about 1955. The rule only works one way. No © does not prove a piece is older. Napier, for example, reused old molds for years.

A patent number ("Pat." or "Des." with a number) gives the earliest possible date for the design, not the year the piece was made. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's table, the first design patent of 1943 was D134,717, so a higher design number means the design dates from 1943 or later. When Antiques Roadshow appraised a group of Trifari "jelly belly" pins, the appraiser dated them to 1943–1945 partly from their patent numbers.

Price guide, appraisal, or "realized at auction"?

Once you know the maker, you'll start seeing numbers. They are not all the same kind of number:

• A price-guide range, like those in Antique Trader, is a collector-author's informed, dated opinion.
• A TV appraisal is an expert's estimate, often a retail figure, and not a sale.
• A realized price is what a buyer actually paid at auction on a known day, sometimes with the buyer's premium added.

Here's why the difference matters. At a Ripley Auctions sale on April 6, 2020, a Haskell gilt filigree necklace sold for $1,625 and a pair of Trifari clips by its designer Alfred Philippe for $813, both including the buyer's premium. Yet a single Antique Trader article on Coro gives ranges from $25–45 for a circus zebra pin to $400–550 for a 1938 Duette. Same maker, very different pieces.

And values move. Antiques Roadshow appraised those Trifari jelly belly pins at $1,400 to $4,800 in 2003, then updated the figure to $625 to $1,400 in 2018. Tastes change. None of these numbers is a price for your piece today.

Before you sell anything. A gold buyer will pay little or nothing for signed costume jewelry, because its value, if it has any, is to collectors. And an insurance appraisal is not an offer: the IRS explains that an insured value reflects only the replacement cost. Learn which kind of number you're hearing before you let anything go.

Volume II, Grandmother's Jewelry Box, profiles the big makers with their marks and dated price data, helps you date a piece from its back, covers unsigned treasures, wartime sterling and fragile plastics, and explains, step by step, the difference between what a piece is worth and what you'll be offered.