Check Your Jewelry Box Before You Sell: 18 Old Pieces Worth A Fortune (And How To Tell If are Real)

Before you sell a single piece from that jewelry box, whether it is your own, your mother's or one you inherited and never opened, stop and check it properly first. The jewelry buyers who set up in hotel rooms and strip malls are paying by weight, and weight tells you almost nothing about what a signed, hallmarked or genuinely rare piece is worth. In this video I walk through eighteen old pieces that turn up constantly in ordinary jewelry boxes and sell for real money, and for each one I show you exactly how to tell whether yours is the real thing. I am Roy Danforth, and for thirty-eight years I have been buying and pricing estate sales, flea markets and antique mall booths across the Ohio Valley and the Midwest. In that time I have seen families sell a signed piece for the price of its metal because nobody turned it over, and I have seen buyers pay serious money for a copy because the stamp on the back looked convincing. I will be honest with you from the start, most of what is in a jewelry box is exactly what it looks like, and I am not going to inflate that for you. But the genuine pieces are out there, and the checks that separate them from the copies take about a minute once you know what to look at. For every piece on this list, I will show you the signature or hallmark, where it sits, how the clasp and the construction should feel in your hand, how the stones and the metal should look, and the small details that give a later copy away. Do not sell anything by weight, do not accept the first offer from a gold buyer, do not clean the back of a piece with anything abrasive, until you have gone through this whole list. If you find this useful, consider subscribing, because I go through a new jewelry box every week. And stay to the end, because the piece at number one is the one I most often see sold for its scrap value, and the check that catches it takes ten seconds.