Sunday 25 June 2017

How To Read a GIA Diamond Grading Report


The diamonds for sale at Chain Me Up are graded for your information, but as they are below 1 carat they do not have a GIA report due to the cost involved in obtaining one.


GIA is the creator of the famous four C’s of diamond value and the international diamond grading system which sets the standards for diamond grading, making us the world’s most respected independent authority on diamond grading.


Each diamond submitted to the GIA grading laboratory is tested to be sure it is actually a natural diamond, a synthetic diamond and to see if it has been treated or not. Then it is graded independently by several highly trained graders.


This is an example of a GIA diamond report which details all pertinent information about a stones quality and characteristics. This is the date the report was issued. Each diamond is assigned a unique identification number. All the grading information for the diamond is stored in GIA’s global database under this report number. Some people choose to have GIA inscribe the report number on the diamond’s girdle to aid in identifying it. You can also inscribe a special logo, graphic or personal message. This line shows that this stone has been laser inscribed with the GIA report number.


This diamond has a round girdle outline and the facets are cut in the brilliant style. This is the stones minimum girdle diameter, the maximum girdle diameter and the diamond’s depth. For a fancy shaped diamond the measurements listed are length, width and depth.


The GIA report also has a facet diagram that approximates the shape and cutting style of the stone. Diamonds are weighed in carats. One carat equals one fifth of a gram. GIA records weight to the nearest one hundredth of a carat which is the internationally recognised practice.


GIA grades colourless and near colourless diamonds for the absence of colour when viewed through the pavilion from colourless to light yellow or brown by comparing them to GIA master colour comparison diamonds. The scale shows the relative position of the colour grades in the GIA colour scale. This stone, a ‘G’, falls in here in the near colourless range.


GIA graders examine diamonds for the presence of any internal and external characteristics. Based on the size, nature and number of any clarity characteristics found using a 10 power loupe, they assign a clarity range of flawless to included. Here is the GIA clarity scale, you can see that VS2 falls in the very slightly included range. Significant or identifying characteristics are marked on the facet diagram. The symbols represent the type, position and approximate size of a clarity characteristic and a key to the symbols used is below the diagram.


Here you can see how cut can affect the appearance of a diamond. This stone shows an even pattern of reflections, this one is dark in the centre and the facets are washed out. The GIA cut grade is used for round brilliant only and is based on the stones face up appearance, design and craftsmanship and it is listed here. This is the scale for the GIA cut grade ranging from excellent to poor. The angles and proportions of the diamond measured with an optical measuring device are presented on the report on this diagram.


Fish grades include polish which is the overall condition or smoothness of the diamond surface and symmetry which is the exactness of the diamond’s outline and the shape, placement and alignment of its facets.


If a diamond shows fluorescence to long-wave ultraviolet, the fluorescent colour and strength can help identify it. Blue is the normal colour of fluorescence in diamonds but it may be other colours. If there is no discernible fluorescence or it is very faint, GIA lists ‘none’ on the report.


Comments describe additional identifying characteristics that are not otherwise represented on the report as well as treatments and if the diamond is inscribed with a special logo, graphic or personal message it is listed here.


GIA diamond reports are highly valued, to ensure that you are in possession of a real report and not a fake or copy they include a suite of security components including a hologram, security screen and micro print lines in addition to several other propriety security features. The GIA diamond dossier is similar to a GIA diamond report but less expensive. It provides the same information as a GIA diamond report but it does not include a facet diagram and plot of clarity characteristics. Instead clarity characteristics are listed here. This is the only real difference between the information on a diamond dossier and a GIA diamond report and all diamonds submitted for a GIA diamond dossier are laser inscribed with the report number.


GIA is not affiliated with any retailer or wholesaler or manufacturer giving you peace of mind knowing that your GIA diamond report or diamond dossier represents the impartial opinion of unbiased professionals. It’s the difference between wondering and knowing.



How To Read a GIA Diamond Grading Report

Monday 19 June 2017

If Jewellery Commercials Were Honest


Thought this was funny, and not that far from the truth in many high end jewellery stores that play on your emotions.


Let me guess, shopping for someone special? These are some pretty rocks we found. They can’t be used for anything and they all cost an exorbitant amount of money.


Some come in shapes and others come with metal wrapped around them. To get them we turn a blind eye to child labourers in the mines directly financed unsustainable mining practices the world over and in some cases buy diamonds directly from maniacal warlords using the money to buy guns and kill their countrymen.


You might think that the danger involved is why they’re so expensive but actually it’s just because we decided they are. There are vaults full of these things but we only sell a few a year to keep the price up like a ticket scalper except that a scalped ticket can be exchanged for the experience of going to a live show and these are inherently worthless rocks like this one, one of my favourites.


This is from our signature shiny rock that we found collection, it’s sure to make that special someone think, “you’re willing to spend too much money on something that shouldn’t cost that much money.” That’s love.


Actually full disclosure, this is cubic zirconia, it looks basically the same but it costs almost nothing. So we use it as a show model. I’ve got a yellow one and I’ve got one shaped like a square, I call these ones ‘fancy’, so we can charge more. Of course if you’re trying to coat an industrial drill, then real diamonds work better otherwise glass is fine but please buy diamonds instead because they cost so much more.


What about that one? Oh, that’s not a jewel, that’s just a pretty rock, it’s worthless. Alan, stop putting rocks in the display case unless you put the rocks in that we arbitrarily decided that are worth a lot of money. Sorry.


Hard to find good help these days when you sell shiny rocks at the mall to idiots. Oh, no offence. So come on down to shiny rock mall store and trade your rectangular pieces of paper and assorted metal disks for these rocks we found. We also accept that you hand us a plastic rectangle and we run it through a computer and hand it back to you. Oh, I’m Roger by the way.


 



If Jewellery Commercials Were Honest

Monday 12 June 2017

Gold Necklace Extenders

LC80EX-400x400It can be difficult to know exactly what length you should choose when purchasing a solid gold necklace.


Often the length will be dictated by the choice of the pendant it carries. You know exactly where the pendant should sit against your chest, and the length of the necklace chain is selected to accommodate this. Being able to buy a necklace of an exact length is one of the major advantages of buying gold chains from Fraser Ross.


Sometimes however the necklace will be used for more than just one pendant, and you may wish to wear them in slightly different positions. So rather than having to purchase two separate chains, how would you feel if you could make one chain just a few centimetres longer? You can, and it’s called a chain extender.


If the chain is to be worn alone, then you may want to match it to the outfit(s) you are planning on wearing it with. Normally you would want to wear it above or below the neckline of your top. If it sits at about the same height of your collar opening, it won’t be seen, so it would be better to have it shorter or longer.


We have a few ways that you can change the length of your necklace chain to make it suit more of the clothing you wear.


One choice is to buy a matching chain extender. If for example, if the perfect necklace length was 45cm to 50cm, depending on your top, you could buy a 45cm necklace and a 5cm chain extender. This gives you the opportunity to wear your chain short to suit a high open neck top, or you can add the extra chain and it will fall nicely over the high collar of a t-shirt. As the chain extenders are only 5cm long, they should remain hidden behind you head and under you hair. If you can see one side, it just looks like the clasp you would normally see on your necklace anyway.


Another way to have a single chain that can be made to different lengths is the simplest of all. Work out the longest size that you would want for your necklace and that is the size to order. If you choose the right style of chain, it is possible to connect the parrot clasp to one of the links inside the necklace instead of the loop at the end of the chain.


This requires a style of gold chain that has wide open links so that the parrot clasp can fit inside a link along the necklace. Belcher chains are one style that this becomes an easy option with. Each individual link is normally round although oval belcher chains are also quite common, but both these designs have adequate space inside the links for a parrot clasp to attach. A 55cm chain can easily be shortened to say 47cm by connecting the clasp back down the chain at an appropriate link. The remaining chain simply hangs behind your head from the clasp on your necklace.


Cable chains and long open curb chains also have links that can accommodate the clasp, so you aren’t limited to one of the belcher chain styles.


So it is possible to make a necklace shorter by taking advantage of the open link style chains or make it longer by adding a necklace chain extender. In a perfect world we would be able to afford a necklace chain to suit every outfit, with and without a pendant, but that is rarely the case, so now you know how to do the best you can with what you have.


 



Gold Necklace Extenders

Thursday 8 June 2017

Starting a Jewellery Business

ipad-website-cmu-750Wow, it’s now 7 years since I launched my online jewellery store and a lot has changed since day one.


I really thought it would be easy, I had a long and varied computer background and well understood (or so I thought) how to create webpages, manage a server and hack the odd program to make it work the way that I wanted, not the way the original programmer intended. Seems easy enough.


Prior to my computer career, I managed and provided all the technical support to a number of photographic labs. These ranged from large commercial providers where we would print photos the size of walls for advertising, through to the everyday, drop your film off and and get the prints and negatives back in a few days. I also installed the first mini-lab for Kodak in Box Hill, a suburb of Melbourne. It was run under a different name so they could get customer feedback that would be unbiased by the having best known brand in the world of photography on their signage. Surely someone with this much experience wouldn’t have any problems taking photos of the jewellery we sell? Being highly technically  skilled does not guarantee you can take a good photo, this is definitely a different skill set.


Well, let me say nothing is ever as easy as you would expect. Take photographing something really small and very shiny (like a silver charm) for example. Having the correct lighting for the shot is absolutely critical, which in itself is no easy task. When each piece is different in shape and reflects light very differently, the lighting needs to be changed for every photo. The camera position is also critical and needs to be changed to suit each different silver or gold charm to get the best angle(s) of view. Changing this of course means that the lighting has to be re-adjusted, oh dear.


If you have ever taken a close up photo of jewellery, you will know that this is just the start of your problems. You have to deal with reflections, something that doesn’t happen when shooting products that aren’t a mirror finish like silver or gold jewellery. Taking a single photo usually means that the whole piece is not in focus, it will be sharp at the front, middle or back, but not all three.


Our photos have changed considerably over time as we have acquired new equipment. A light tent is important as it guarantees constant lighting, unaffected by any ambient light sources, and was the first upgrade to our kit. The first camera we used was a Fuji Finepix, it did an OK job, but lacked any real control over close focusing and exposure compensation. We upgraded to a Canon SLR with a true macro lens. This gave us much better control over all the camera functions and was a big step forward. The real advantage though was being able to connect it to a computer and control everything from the computer screen. Focusing was still a problem as the depth of field when shooting close up is very narrow and our photos where still not in focus all the way from front to back. You can ‘stop down’ the lens aperture to compensate, but this introduces other issues with digital cameras. So to counteract this we invested in some new software that could take multiple images, from the front to the back of a piece with each focused at a different point. A companion software program combines all the individual images into one, that is in focus all the way from front to back. Yeah, a perfectly focused close up photo of a stunning gold charm!


Of course, getting the photo from the camera is just the start. It then has to be cleaned up in a graphics program to remove the background and any tiny dust spots that may have been missed when shooting. Colour correction is also needed at times and images may need to be lightened or darkened to stand out from the background. To make the images load quickly from our website, they must be as small as possible. There is always a trade-off between speed and quality, so getting just the right balance is important.


Our website runs eCommerce software that does everything from showing our jewellery products and their options and pricing, searching for items that we stock and looking after the transfer of funds from PayPal when we make a sale. It is comprised of hundreds of individual programs that interact with each other to form the shopping cart sections of our website. The overall layout is now based on bootstrap, which is excellent for creating a responsive design, that views well on computers, tablets and mobile phones.


Over the years we have made many custom edits to the cart software to make it do things that the software company hadn’t included. This in itself isn’t really a problem, until they release an update and we have to find and re-edit the changes we made earlier in the updated programs. As they are very active in improving their software, these updates are released more frequently than we would prefer. Thankfully, they have also included many of the ‘fixes’ we have custom written into the base product, so we have less to do each time.


Web design, cart software and photographs are only a small part of what it takes to build a jewellery store in the online world. There are so many other aspects to running a successful online store, each with its challenges. As a small business, we don’t have a massive support crew to call on day and night, so it mostly is a matter of head down and bum up until a solution is found.


So, would I do it all again? The same way? Hell, NO! Hindsight tells me I should find someone who had already been through all the trials and tribulations I have experienced over the past 7 years and paid them to do it for me. Having said that, I have learned a lot and if anyone needs my help to launch a new online store, I am well armed with the knowledge I wish I had when I started out.



Starting a Jewellery Business

Tuesday 6 June 2017

Jewellery Care

tangled-jewelleryWe often get enquiries from our customers at Chain Me Up as to how to properly care for their jewellery.


The first and most important thing we advise is to store their jewellery correctly. The worst thing you can do is just throw all your pieces into a box or drawer. This can lead to scratches as silver and gold are quite soft and are easily damaged by scraping on the much harder stones such as rubies, diamonds and even the glass stones in fashion jewellery.


It should also be noted that gold rubbing against gold or silver won’t normally cause any damage. Customers who are unaware of this will order a number of charms from our store and ask for them to be individually wrapped. They then have the charms fitted to their bracelet where they bounce against each other all day long and don’t get damaged.


It fact the last thing we do with our charms before shipping them is to polish them in a tumbler. This is a rubber barrel filled with stainless steel media, the jewellery, water and a few drops of detergent. The media is made up of balls, pins and saucers (like flying saucers) and this burnishes the surface of the jewellery to harden it and create a beautiful shine. The tumbler turns the barrel for about 8 hours and everything inside is constantly rubbing against and striking the media and each other. So no, your charms won’t be damaged by shipping them all together in one pouch.


If you own a number of necklaces and store them all together in a box, it is likely that you have found after time and digging through to find the necklace you want to wear, that the chains have all tangled together. Untangling a bunch of fine gold chains is about as much fun as trying to sort white sugar and brown sugar granules from a kitchen spill. The other issue here is that people get frustrated and can apply too much force in trying to untangle the mess and can damage the chains.


You should store your necklaces and bracelets individually in the box or suede pouch them came in. It will stop them tangling and being scratched by gemstones. You can also hang them one to a peg from a necklace tree and this also makes it easier to find the chain that you want to wear.


There are some beautiful jewellery boxes that have individual compartments for storing everything from necklaces to rings to pendants where everything can be easily seen as well as protected. The one down side to this is that all your precious jewellery can be picked up together in the event of a robbery.


Should you find that you need to untangle a mess of gold chains, then there are a couple of helpful hints to make it a little easier. Lay the chains flat on tea towel or table cloth; it is easier if gravity isn’t working against you. A light sprinkle of talcum powder works like a lubricant and helps to get the different chains to separate. A couple of dress makers pins can be used to pick fine chains apart, generally this works better than your fingers, especially with very fine chains.


One of the most common causes of jewellery losing its lustre is contamination. This may be soap, shampoo or conditioner if you wear your necklace or earrings in the shower. It is also common for people to apply makeup or perfume whilst wearing jewellery, this is not a good idea, put on your jewels last thing after getting made up.


Silver and sterling silver can be affected by sulphur compounds which cause tarnishing. This causes the surface of the silver to slowly turn yellowish. If it is left uncleaned it will eventually turn a very dark grey. This is the same effect as ‘antiquing’ or deliberately darkening silver using liver of sulphur (a mixture of potassium sulphides). A jeweller can clean it for you or you can easily do it yourself with a homemade recipe that we have on our website.



Jewellery Care

Thursday 1 June 2017

Charms for life

gold bracelet and charmsA quality gold or silver charm bracelet will last a lifetime and will carry the individual memories of each of your achievements. Sometimes charms are collected just because they are beautiful, but much more often the reason is much more important. Birthdays, weddings, a love of a particular sport, the musical instrument or graduating with a degree are just some of the reasons your charm bracelet keeps growing.


If you are just getting the bug and starting out a charm bracelet from scratch, there are a few things to consider before taking the leap.


Most people once bitten, will wear their bracelet nearly every day, some never take them off. Any jewellery that is going to be worn 24/7 needs to be great quality. It is false economy to buy cheap bracelets, they just won’t last the test of time and they could never become the family heirloom. For this reason we only recommend and sell solid precious metal chains and charms. Gold filled, gold or silver plated, rolled gold, vermeil, gold layered and gold bonded are just terms for inferior jewellery, anything other than solid gold or solid sterling silver is really just costume jewellery, and certainly something that will never be passed down through your family.


The style of chain is also very important, to connect charms with a jump ring, the links in the bracelet need to be open and this is why the belcher chains are so popular with charm collectors. That’s not to say you couldn’t use any other style of chain that you find more attractive, just make sure that a jump ring can easily fit within the chain links. The other advantage of a belcher bracelet is that the links are short compared with other designs. This means that a belcher chain will have more links than a curb chain of the same length for example, the more links, the more ways you can arrange the charms.


Normally a jeweller will solder the jump rings closed to make sure the charms stay connected to the the bracelet. There are other ways to connect your charms though. Parrot clasps can be used to enable you to move charms around on a bracelet or to another bracelet. For Pandora style snake chains, traditional charms can be fitted to a ‘slider’ that the snake chain fits through allowing you to mix and match bead style charms with traditional charms on the same bracelet.


Link-Locks are an Australian invention that are just as secure as soldering, but you can fit them yourself. This is usually cheaper than visiting a jeweller, but it is sometimes good to have a professional look over your jewellery to spot and correct any small problems before any damage becomes a major problem. (A bit off topic, but engagement rings and other rings with precious stones should be checked yearly)


When choosing the charms to add to your bracelet you will very likely be influenced more by what is important to you than anything else. If you are buying for someone else, this should be the only reason you choose a particular charm. A charm bracelet is the very important story of one’s life and the events, achievements and loves that have shaped that life.


As with the bracelet chains, the quality of the charms is paramount. We only stock solid sterling silver and solid gold charms, anything else will not last, and a charm bracelet is a lifelong endeavour. If you purchase a bracelet and charms in one purchase, we can arrange them and solder the jump rings at the same time. You just have to let us know how you want your charms arranged.


Poorly made charms abound on sites like eBay and you may be tempted by the ‘great’ prices. In life, if something seems to good to be true, it is. Always. Due to very poor oversight on internet market websites, many charms are made of brass and silver or gold plated and then stamped (hallmarked) as being 925 silver or 375 gold. Only buy jewellery from a reputable site and you will be assured of getting what you paid for.


I’m sure we haven’t answered all of your questions, so feel free to call or email us. We are open everyday from 8am to 8pm and would love to help you to make the right decision when purchasing quality jewellery.


 



Charms for life