5 Clues Grandma's “Diamond” Ring Needs a Real Test Before You Sell

👉 How to find out what your things are really worth → https://mrwalterashford.com It has been called the diamond ring for sixty years and nobody in the family has ever checked. That is not carelessness — that is what a NAME does. Somebody said the word once at a kitchen table, probably about something she had been told herself by a man in a shop in 1952. 💍 ⚠️ These are not five things that PROVE it is a diamond. They are five things that tell you it needs a real test before it leaves the house. The internet is full of men in kitchens claiming to prove it with a glass of water. Jewelry is the easiest thing in an American house to buy badly from a family, for three reasons: it is small, so it leaves in a pocket · it is emotional, so people hurry to have the conversation over with · and it is the one category where the buyer has a machine in his hand and you do not. 💍 CLUE 5 — read the INSIDE of the band with your phone camera zoomed all the way in (that does the job a loupe does). 14K · 585 · 750 · 925 · PT · and the three that answer the question on their own: GF, RGP, HGE. Plus the exception that costs families money: real old diamonds were often set in SILVER, because silver was the white metal they had. ⏱️ CLUE 4 — the cut is a clock. Look straight down into the middle: a small open window or dark dot at the centre is an OLD CUT, and old stones in their original settings are frequently worth more TOGETHER than the stone alone. Which makes "take it out and reset it" the worst advice in the room. 🔍 CLUE 3 — wear is the honest witness, and it is what a dealer actually uses across a table in two seconds. Diamond keeps knife-sharp facet edges for fifty years on a hand. CZ, glass and paste go soft and rounded, and no cleaning fixes it because it is not dirt. 🧪 CLUE 2 — the four tests that lie (fog, read-through, water, and the scratch test that has destroyed real stones), and the two worth your evening: WEIGHT (CZ is far denser than diamond for the same size) and a $10 UV flashlight — useful above all for COMPARING the stones in one ring against each other. ⭐ CLUE 1 — the paper, and it is not on the ring at all. And the single most misunderstood document in this subject: an INSURANCE APPRAISAL is not what the ring is worth. It is what it would cost to replace new at retail, deliberately high, and very often written by the person who sold it. 🚫 And never let anybody buy the ring BY WEIGHT. The stones get treated as a nuisance, they come out, and the gold goes in a crucible. Turn it over. Read the bottom. Believe what it tells you. 📕📗📘 The three books — Turn It Over · Never Take the First Offer · The Ashford Ledger https://mrwalterashford.com #WalterAshford #Jewelry #Diamonds #EstateJewelry #Downsizing #KnowWhatYouOwn