What Your Jewellery Is Made Of (And Why Nobody Told You)

When someone hands me a piece of jewellery to recycle, the first thing I do is take it apart.

It's quiet work. Just me, the bench, and whatever someone has carried around on their hand or their wrist for years. Sometimes decades. And as the piece comes apart in my hands, the metal tells me exactly what it is.

Cast jewellery has a particular quality when you get close to it. Granular, almost. There's a brittleness to the structure that you don't see from the outside but you feel the moment you start to work with it. The surface can look beautiful. But inside, the metal is different. Poured into a mould, it sets quickly, and that speed leaves a trace.

I notice it every time. After forty years at the bench, you can't not.

Most people have never thought about how their jewellery was made. Why would you? You chose it because it was beautiful, or meaningful, or both. How it came to exist probably wasn't part of the conversation.

But here's something worth knowing.

If you walk into any jewellery shop and see or pick up two identical pieces, same ring, same pendant, same earrings, they were almost certainly cast. The moment a design needs to be reproduced at scale, casting makes sense. Molten metal is poured into a mould, set, finished, and the process begins again. It's efficient, consistent, and considerably faster than the alternative.

There's nothing dishonest about it. Casting has its place. Some beautiful jewellery is cast.

It's just not what I do.

Every piece I make starts with sheet silver and gold or wire. I cut, form, solder, shape and finish by hand, one piece at a time, from scratch. There is no mould. There is no duplicate. The piece on your finger or at your collarbone exists because someone made it, not because something poured it.

This matters more than it might sound.

Handmade sterling silver is denser. It sits differently in the hand. It wears differently over time, developing a patina that belongs to you rather than dulling in the way cast metal can. And when something needs to be repaired or reworked, the metal responds. It's workable because it was worked in the first place.

Cast pieces can be harder to repair well. The granular structure I feel when I take them apart is the same structure that resists the bench. Sometimes it's fine. Sometimes it isn't. Either way, you can tell.

I think about this when people bring me jewellery to recycle, pieces that have been worn and loved and have reached the end of one life and are ready for another. Taking them apart is a little like reading them. The metal has a history, and the history is in the structure.

The handmade pieces are immediately obvious. The gold or silver moves differently. It has a quality that forty years of handling tells you is real before you've even thought about why.

It's the difference between something built and something poured.

I'll always build.

Sue