Is antique jewellery a good investment?
When it comes to guilt-free purchasing pleasures, you can’t beat antique jewellery. When you buy a piece of antique jewellery, you’ve purchased something that’s beautiful to wear, has proven quality (it’s already lasted 100 years!) AND has an intrinsic and extrinsic value - more about that later.
In a nutshell, you can often buy old jewellery risk-free, which means you may be able to resell the piece at the same, or a higher price in the future. Here’s the Windsor Jewel Attic’s guide to why antique jewellery can be a great investment.
What is intrinsic value?
Intrinsic value, when it comes to jewellery, is the value of the raw materials that have gone into making the piece.
Gold and Silver
Precious metals and gemstones have an intrinsic value that has grown over time. Gold prices are rising right now, thanks to unstable economic markets around the globe. Gold has always been viewed as a safe haven for investors, so in times of uncertainty (like the past few years), gold prices spike.
Silver also has an intrinsic value, along with other precious metals such as platinum and palladium, but these tend not to reach the heights of high-carat gold.
When assessing your jewellery, the higher the gold content, the better. 9ct gold is less pure than say, 18ct or 22ct gold, so it carries a lower intrinsic value. We’ll explore gold carats in another of our blogs.
Gemstones
Diamonds, rubies, sapphires and emeralds all fetch the highest prices and have the highest intrinsic values. These stones are incredibly hard and robust, which means you can find them in antique jewellery that’s a couple of hundred years old, but they won’t have so much as a scratch on them!
If you’re looking for serious value from a gemstone, you’ll need to assess it for size and clarity, as well as establishing whether it’s the real deal, which requires expert knowledge.
What’s extrinsic value when it comes to buying antique jewellery?
This is all about the value an item carries because of factors like rarity, design and desirability. This is where it gets really interesting. Here at Windsor Jewel Attic, we’re most interested in this side of antique jewellery buying. This is what we’re looking for when we go on a sourcing trip.
A piece can be desirable because it carried a social history relevance, like wartime love tokens or suffragette jewellery. Others are more valuable because they’re made from a fashionable material (we love coral, turquoise and mother of pearl for example).
Other things that can add to antique jewellery’s extrinsic value include:
Age
Symbolism
Personalisation/inscriptions
Craftsmanship
Condition
Sure, this is more down to the individual, and fashions can change, but providing you keep abreast of these changes, you can make sure your collection retains value while you wear it!
So next time you visit an antiques fair or look to buy some antique jewellery online, keep these factors in mind. If you make wise decisions, you can build up a valuable collection with limited outlay.
