What Is Costume Jewelry Worth?

Costume jewelry covers everything from a drugstore brooch to a Miriam Haskell collar that took a workroom hours to wire by hand. Most of it, honestly, is worth $5 to $50 a piece. But a short list of makers, in the right condition, brings hundreds and occasionally thousands of dollars, and those pieces are almost always sitting unrecognized in the same box as everything else.

The honest baseline

Unsigned mid-century rhinestone pieces, plastic bead necklaces, and mass-market names like Avon and Sarah Coventry usually sell for $5 to $50, often in lots rather than individually. Most Monet and Napier lands in the same range. This is not a knock on the jewelry. It was made in enormous quantities, it survives in enormous quantities, and the market prices it accordingly. The point of this guide is what to look for before you treat the whole box that way.

The names that change the math

A handful of American and European makers built costume jewelry to a standard that collectors now pay real money for. The names below are the ones we check for first when a box comes into the Laguna Hills warehouse or comes out of a dresser on a house call.

Miriam Haskell

Haskell pieces were wired together by hand, often around pierced brass filigree backplates, using baroque glass pearls and beads sourced from Japan and Europe. Signed pieces carry a small horseshoe or oval plaque, but the company did not mark most work before the late 1940s, so early Haskell is identified by construction, not signature. Common signed earrings might bring $50 to $150. Elaborate multi-strand necklaces and the best 1940s-60s pieces can bring $300 to $1,500, sometimes more.

Trifari and the Alfred Philippe crown

Look for a crown sitting on top of the T in the Trifari mark. Alfred Philippe, who had designed for the workshops that supplied Van Cleef and Cartier, ran Trifari design from 1930 into the 1960s, and his pieces are the ones that bring money. Jelly belly animal pins, with a clear Lucite dome for a body, often sell in the $200 to $1,000 range depending on the animal and condition. The jeweled crown pins with big cabochons commonly bring $100 to $400. Plain later Trifari, marked with a copyright symbol and no crown, is usually $15 to $60.

Eisenberg Originals

Eisenberg started out sewing oversized Austrian crystal brooches onto dresses to stop shoplifters from stealing just the pin. The 1930s-40s pieces marked Eisenberg Original are large, heavy, and set with exceptional stones, and they tend to bring $100 to $600. Later pieces marked Eisenberg Ice are still good jewelry but sell for much less.

Schiaparelli, Weiss, Coro Duette, and Boucher

Elsa Schiaparelli's signed costume pieces, especially the 1950s sets with iridescent watermelon stones and strange, saturated colors, commonly bring $150 to $800, with the signature usually in script on a small plate or clip. Weiss made some of the best rhinestone work of the 1950s. Most of it brings $20 to $100, with the black japanned pieces and figural butterflies at the top of that range or a bit above. A Coro Duette is a brooch that splits into two dress clips on a patented frame. The figural Duettes, owls and horse heads and quivering flowers, often bring $75 to $350. Marcel Boucher pieces, frequently marked with a number as well as the name, run roughly $50 to $400 for good figurals.

Bakelite, and how to test it honestly

Bakelite is an early phenolic plastic, heavy and dense, made into bangles, figural pins, and beads mostly in the 1930s and 40s. Plain bangles usually bring $20 to $75. Deeply carved bangles typically bring $75 to $400. The rare stuff, polka dot bangles, laminated multicolor pieces, and big figural pins, can bring several hundred to a few thousand dollars from serious collectors.

Two honest tests. Run the piece under hot tap water for thirty seconds and smell it: real Bakelite gives off a sharp chemical smell, like formaldehyde or old electronics. Or touch a cotton swab of Simichrome polish or 409 cleaner to an inconspicuous spot: on most Bakelite the swab turns yellow. Skip the hot pin test you may have read about. It scars the piece, and the fumes are genuinely bad for you. Black Bakelite sometimes fails the swab test even when it is real, which is one more reason to let someone who handles it regularly make the final call.

Where the marks hide

Signatures on costume jewelry are small and rarely where you expect them. Check with a magnifier or your phone camera zoomed in:

• The pin stem or the flat plate behind a brooch
• The tongue or fold-over of a necklace clasp
• A tiny applied plaque or cartouche soldered to the back
• The back of a single leaf or petal in a figural casting
• The underside of an earring clip
• The hook end of a bracelet

An unsigned piece is not automatically a cheap piece. Early Haskell, much 1930s work, and pieces that lost a marked element can all be unsigned and still valuable. Weight, prong-set stones instead of glued ones, and hand-finished backs are the tells.

Condition, verdigris, and complete sets

Condition moves prices hard in this category. Verdigris, the fuzzy green corrosion that grows on base metal, is the killer: it spreads, it undercuts plating, and it is very difficult to remove without damage. A piece with active verdigris can lose most of its value. Missing stones matter too, and clumsy replacements in the wrong cut or color matter more. Haskell pearls with peeling coatings, darkened rhodium, and repainted enamel all pull prices down.

Completeness pushes the other way. A parure is a matched set, typically necklace, bracelet, earrings, and brooch, and a complete signed parure is worth more than the same four pieces sold separately, often meaningfully more. Original boxes and tags help. If a set was kept together for seventy years, keep it together now.

A sorting method for an inherited box

If you have inherited a jewelry box or a dresser full of it, here is the order we would work in:

• Clean nothing. No dips, no polish, no toothbrush. Cleaning removes patina, lifts finishes, and destroys the coating on glass pearls.
• Pull everything with any mark at all into one pile, even marks you cannot read.
• From the unsigned pieces, pull anything heavy for its size, anything with prong-set stones, and anything with wired or hand-built construction on the back.
• Warm-water test the chunky plastic bangles and figural pins for Bakelite.
• Leave single earrings, plastic beads, and obviously modern pieces in a lot pile. They still have value, just by the tray rather than by the piece.

If you have a box of it

Photograph the pieces in daylight, fronts and backs, with a close shot of any mark you find. Do nothing else to them. Then talk to a buyer who handles costume jewelry every week, not a general resale shop that will weigh the sterling and guess at the rest. We are dealers, not certified appraisers, and our offers reflect the real collector markets we sell into. We look at boxes like this constantly, we come to you anywhere in Southern California, we explain what each piece is as we go, and if you like the number we pay cash on the spot.