Many fine jewelers are unfamiliar with glass as a material, or they consider it worthless and will snub their nose at it. This is a shame because glass has a long history of being in fine jewelry that many jewelers have little knowledge of. Fine jewelers will generally not repair costume jewelry items. If your local jeweler cannot or will not work on your piece, you are welcome to send me an email with photos and info on what needs done. I can be backed up on repairs so sometimes they can take awhile, but I can repair most things.
A fine jeweler will declare these as worthless because they don't have knowledge of costume jewelry, but these would fetch several hundred to
k+ at auction
Conversely, some jewelers are familiar with uranium glass and will misidentify lab spinel gems as uranium glass because they do not know what spinel is.
Green lab spinels are almost identical to uranium glass in both color and glow. Spinel is not a well-known gemstone at all, and is frequently misidentified. Most jewelers can test gems and at least tell you of they are glass or a gemstone of some kind. If it tests as a gemstone, and it is green in color and glows bright green, it is a lab spinel. More information on them here -
(Link to spinel FAQ)
14k lab spinel ring misdentified as uranium glass by a GIA gemologist. They identified it only by the blacklight glow, and not by actually testing it. Even the best of the best can get it wrong sometimes
I do not want to disparage the work and knowledge of others jewelers as there are many fabulous and knowledgeable jewelers out there, but the fact of the matter is like with any industry, some jewelers are better than others. They will get things wrong sometimes. Because of their unfamiliarity with glass, they will sometimes declare a piece not real gold or silver without taking an actual close look at it, or they won't test it properly. Or sometimes the piece will be sterling and something like the safety chain or clasp was replaced at some point with a different material. I am very diligent about testing all of my pieces, even if they are marked as sterling or gold, because sometimes they can be marked without actually testing for the metal they say they are. For my handmade products, I cast my sterling pieces to order, which requires that I use sterling with 92.5% silver content. It is impossible to do this with costume metals.
Vintage uranium glass bracelet I sold to a customer whose local jeweler told them it was not real sterling, despite both testing as and being marked as sterling. They jeweler determined this by only seeing the safety chain, pictured bottom right, that had been replaced and is not sterling, without looking at or testing the entire piece
If a jeweler gives you a quote for a repair or a resize and it seems like a lot, feel free to send me an email for a second opinion. If you go to a jewelry store for a repair or resize, and they pull out a big blue book to look up the price of the work, RUN AWAY. Find a different jeweler that doesn't use that book or contact me.
If a jeweler pulls out a book that looks like this to determine the price of your repair, GO SOMEWHERE ELSE. The pricing used in this book is egregiously high to an unfair degree.
