Trifari Jewelry Value: What the Crown Means and What It Brings

Trifari is the name families find most often in an old jewelry box, because the company made good jewelry in enormous quantity for sixty years. So the honest answer has two halves. Most of it is worth a little. A specific slice, made under one designer in one window of years, is worth a great deal more, and the difference is stamped on the back. This guide reads that stamp and puts modest, dated numbers on each era.

Is Trifari jewelry worth anything?

Yes, and the amount depends on when it was made far more than on how it looks. The company was built in New York by Gustavo Trifari, the son of a Naples goldsmith, who went into business with Leo Krussman in the late 1910s; Carl Fishel joined in 1925 and the firm became Trifari, Krussman and Fishel, whose initials make up the KTF of the earliest marks. In 1930 they hired Alfred Philippe, a French designer who had drawn for the workshops supplying Cartier and Van Cleef and Arpels, and he ran Trifari design until he retired in 1968. His years are the ones the market pays for.

The value tiers, as of September 2026 and set deliberately at the middle of the market rather than the top: plain later Trifari with a copyright symbol and no crown, the 1970s and 1980s production most boxes hold, brings $15 to $60 a piece. Crown-marked pins from the Philippe era commonly bring $50 to $150. The jelly belly animals with a clear Lucite body bring $200 to $600 for good examples. Above that sit a few scarce designs that have sold into the low thousands at auction; those are records, and a record is a ceiling, not an expectation. The costume jewelry value guide puts these numbers beside Haskell, Eisenberg and Coro.

What does the crown over the T on Trifari jewelry mean?

It means the piece was made while Alfred Philippe ran the design room, and it is the most useful thing on the back of any Trifari piece. Philippe designed a series of jeweled crown brooches, big colored cabochons with pave stones, that sold so well the company put a crown into its own signature; most published accounts date the change to about 1937. One crown brooch design is on file as US design patent D137542, filed by Philippe in February 1944 and granted that March, which is why some crown pins read Des. Pat. Pend. on the back. A crown on the T puts a piece inside the roughly 1937 to late 1960s window. It does not by itself make a piece valuable, since plain earrings and pearl strands wore the crown too, but nothing worth serious money was made without it.

How do I date Trifari jewelry from the mark?

Read the back under a bright light with the phone camera zoomed in, then place it on this table. Three of these cliffs are documented events and safe to rely on: the crown, the copyright symbol, and wartime sterling. The rest are collector consensus, and where published lists disagree the table says so. The makers marks guide covers the same logic for Coro, Haskell and Eisenberg.

Two cautions on that table. The copyright symbol is the sharpest tool in it: Trifari won a federal case in 1955 establishing costume jewelry designs as copyrightable art, so a small c in a circle means the design is 1955 or later, with no exceptions. The year the crown left the mark is the murkiest: most collector sources put it in the 1970s, at least one puts it later, and the published lists for the in-between variants disagree. When a piece falls in that gap, date it from construction and style, not the stamp.

What is a Trifari jelly belly?

A figural pin, usually an animal, bird, fish or insect, whose body is a polished dome of clear Lucite acrylic, made mostly in the 1940s. Trifari was the leading maker, though Coro and a few smaller houses made their own, and the best Trifari examples came out of the Philippe design room during the war years, which is why so many are marked Trifari Sterling: the base white metal costume makers normally used was restricted from roughly 1942 to 1947. Some carry a warm plated finish, some carry pave rhinestones around the dome. The Lucite is the point: scratched, chipped, clouded or replaced domes cost most of the value.

Prices are where families most often get a wrong number from the internet. Good jelly belly animals bring $200 to $600, and sales support that band: a sterling swan brought $368 against a $200 to $300 estimate at Skinner in Marlborough, Massachusetts, on June 15, 2011, and a sailfish brought $350 at Greenwich Auction in February 2020, as reported by Invaluable. The scarcest designs sit far above that. A price guide published in Antique Trader in November 2022 puts the parrot and certain flower jelly bellies at $3,000 to $4,500 and the poodle and other dog designs at $1,500 to $2,000; those are a guide author’s estimates for the rarest forms, not sales we have seen, and they describe a ceiling. The honest expectation for the pin in your hand is $200 to $600, and we would rather quote that and beat it at the table.

Who was Alfred Philippe, and why does his era matter so much?

Philippe came to Trifari in 1930 from the French fine jewelry world and stayed thirty-eight years. He brought fine jewelry habits to a costume factory: designs drawn as if the stones were real, stones held by prongs rather than glue, and plating that has often survived intact. The company registered his designs by the hundred, first as design patents and after 1955 under copyright. The results are the pieces collectors name: the jeweled crowns, the jelly bellies, the enamel and pave figurals of the late 1930s and 1940s, the fruit salad pieces with molded glass cut to look like carved stones, and the pearl and rhinestone parures of the 1950s. Trifari kept making good jewelry after he retired in 1968, but the market prices his years as a separate thing, and the crown is how it finds them.

Did Mamie Eisenhower really wear Trifari?

Yes. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History holds the gown Mamie Eisenhower wore to the 1953 inaugural balls, a pink peau de soie by Nettie Rosenstein embroidered with more than 2,000 rhinestones, and records that she wore it with jewelry by Trifari. By most accounts she asked Trifari for pearls again for the 1957 inaugural ball; a press release describing that gown and jewelry survives in her papers at the Eisenhower Presidential Library. A costume house worn by a First Lady on the most photographed night of the decade is why Trifari pearls sold in such volume through the 1950s, and why so many survive: a Trifari faux pearl strand is a $20 necklace at auction today, and the Eisenhower connection does not change that.

Is Trifari still made? Who owns the name?

The name survives; the company collectors mean does not. The founding families sold Trifari to Hallmark in 1975. Crystal Brands bought it in 1988, the Monet Group in 1994, and Liz Claiborne acquired the Monet Group in 2000 and moved production out of the United States, which collectors treat as the end of signed American Trifari. The jewelry itself was made in the Providence, Rhode Island area, the center of the American costume trade. A piece marked Trifari TM dates from the late 1980s or later; it is honest jewelry and it is priced as such.

What has Trifari actually sold for at auction?

Realized results, not asking prices, are the only numbers worth carrying into a sale. These are the ones we could verify, with the house and the date.

Notice the shape. The two results above $2,000 are a signed early set and a named Philippe design in unusual stones. The ordinary crown pin brought $160, the pearls twenty dollars. Dealer asking prices on retail sites run well above every figure here; an ask is what a seller hopes for, never a value.

What should I not do to Trifari before selling it?

• Do not polish it. The plating is part of the value, and metal polish strips it and grays the foil behind any rhinestones.
• Do not clean rhinestone pieces with liquid. Water gets under the foil backs and dulls them permanently.
• Do not touch the Lucite on a jelly belly. No polish, no glue, no reseating a loose dome.
• Do not replace a missing stone with a modern one. A missing stone is an honest deduction; a wrong replacement is a bigger one.
• Do not split a matched set. A parure, the necklace, bracelet and earrings together, is worth more complete than sold one at a time, and more again in its original box.
• Do not sell the box at one blended price before every clasp has been read. One crown piece regularly outprices the rest of the tray.

How we buy Trifari

We buy costume jewelry outright, Trifari very much included. Signed pieces are priced individually, in front of you, with the era explained as we go; the modest remainder gets one honest lot offer; and everything is paid for in cash the same visit. Across Southern California that is a free house call or an appointment at our Laguna Hills warehouse. Outside California we buy by video call: the price is agreed on the call, we pay by PayPal before you ship, and the shipping is on us. To compare routes first, the where-to-sell guide names every one honestly, including where a patient seller does better than we can.