About Precious Metals is a jewelry store in Sudbury, MA. We build custom pieces that range from traditional to way out there. Check out our web store and gallery.
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http://www.boston.com/business/personalfinance/articles/2010/03/05/all_that_glitters_may_not_be_cash/
Great article about selling gold. While Precious Metals buys gold, we will ALWAYS tell you exactly what we pay per pennyweight and will convert that to a per gram price if you request. We will break it down to the exact percentage that we pay (63%). Which mean that if the market value of the earrings in the article is $14.64, we would pay $9.23. That is more than what the dealers in the article pay, but more importantly, if the earrings were brand new (the examples in the article were just purchased) we would have advised you not to sell them as scrap! Never sell a piece of wearable jewelry as scrap unless you are desperate or have exhausted other options. Selling jewelry on e-bay or at a consignment store will allow you to get money for the workmanship and wearablity of the gold along with it’s market value as a precious metal. We also do metal exchanges. Say you have some 14K gold chains, and you want us to make a 14K gold ring. We will use the weight of your metal towards the weight of the metal in the new piece less ten percent. So essentially you are getting 90% of the value of the gold back.
Bottom line, do your research. Get quotes, and if you aren’t getting clear answers, don’t waste your time.
 14K white gold earrings with pink pear shaped Fresh Water Pearls We love pearls at Precious Metals! They come in a million different colors and shapes. Because there are so many different options on the market, we wanted to give you a brief overview of everything under the sea!
Terminology
Cultured- Almost every pearl on the market, any pearls you would find in a jewelry store are cultured. This means that the pearl developed through human intervention. Pearls do occur in nature, but since the development of pearl farming, which allows for a more consistent product, you rarely see natural pearls in modern jewelry. Often when people refer to pearls as cultured they mean that the pearls are salt water, as opposed to fresh water. People began culturing salt water pearls in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The culturing of fresh water pearls began in 1917 in Japan.
Nacre- The outer layer of a pearl which provides it’s luster and surface quality. A natural pearl is comprised almost entirely of nacre covering a small natural irritant to the mollusk that is forming the pearl. A cultured pearl is made as nacre covers a seed implanted by the pearl farmer.
Salt water- There are several varieties of salt water pearls, the most popular being the South Sea, Tahitian, and Akoya.
South Sea pearls are originally from Australia, but are now farmed in Indonesia, Burma, and the Philippines. They typically range in size from about 10mm to 15mm and in color from white to silvery pink to a rich gold. South Sea pearls have a very small seed and a very thick nacre. The many layers of the semi-translucent nacre are what give the South Sea pearl its incredible luster.
Tahitian Pearls are often called black pearls. They range in color from a black or dark silvery gray often with peacock green and purple overtones. They typically range in size from about 8mm to 13mm. Both the Tahitian and South Sea Pearls come in a variety of shapes ranging from perfectly round to slightly oval to baroque (free formed). These two pearl varieties are the most luxurious and expensive of all the pearls.
Akoya pearls are a smaller salt water pearl, growing to be about 10mm at their largest. They are by far the most common salt water pearls available. Because the nacre thickness is less than that of the South Sea or the Tahitian and more than one pearl can be grown in a mollusk at a time, the grow time for the Akoya pearl is considerably less than that of a South Sea or Tahitian, therefore they are usually less expensive. The Akoyas start at around 3mm in size and range from white to off white and white with pink undertones.
Fresh Water- During the early days of fresh water pearl cultivation, the pearls were typically tiny baroque pearls that resembled rice crispy cereal in their size and shape. These first fresh water pearls were almost all from Lake Biwa in Japan, and till this day the term Biwa still refers to that Rice crispy style or stick like pearl. Over decades scientists have cross bred the mussels used in fresh water pearl production and have refined the growing process. Today, fresh water pearls can be found in sizes up to around 12mm. They can be perfectly round and smooth and can often match the luster of the Akoya saltwater. Naturally they occur in whites, off whites, pinks, lavenders, and some light grays, but they can be dyed any color under the sun. The shapes of fresh waters are determined by the seed inserted in the mussel, and the variety of shapes is endless. There are coin pearls, which are flat and circular. Stick pearls which are long and thin. Rounds, pears, potatoes, peanuts, cones, squares, even cross shaped pearls are all common varieties. Because each mussel can produce up to a hundred pearls at a time, fresh water pearls are very affordable. A decent strand of white Akoya 5mm pearls can cost over $1000; while a very high quality strand of 5mm white round fresh water pearls can be under $100. Side by side there is a difference in quality. Typically the akoya have a better luster than the fresh water, but for every day pearls to wear to work with your favorite blouse or on the weekends with blue jeans, fresh water pearls can’t be beat.
Things to think about when shopping for pearls and basic pearl care.
If you are looking for a real investment piece, something to pass down from generation to generation, take a good look at all three varieties of salt water pearls. The South Sea and Tahitian pearls retain their value and incredible luster if properly cared for, and when paired with a stunning platinum and diamond clasp can be the statement piece of a lifetime. For the classic white pearl necklace, Akoyas are a fantastic option, with lots of luster and a smaller more manageable size than the South Seas. For every day pearls or something more fun and funky, fresh water pearls are the way to go. You can still do the classic white pearl necklace, but with a sterling silver clasp you can do it for under $200. While not as popular as they once were, Add a Pearl necklaces are still a fun gift. You start with a gold chain and one or more pearls, then you add pearls for special occasions such as birthdays and communions. As you add pearls the chain gets shorter, and eventually you have a full strand of pearls. Akoya pearls are great for this, because it spreads out their cost and they are typically a better pearl than the fresh water.
Certain types of pearls come in certain sizes. If you want really big, you’ll have to either go with the more expensive Salt water pearls or a simulated pearl. If you want really small, you’ll have to go with a fresh water or a simulated pearl. Simulated pearls come in a variety of colors, styles, and sizes and are made in many different ways. If you want a really big pearl necklace to look like Nancy Pelosi but don’t want to spend thousands, check out Swarovski’s line of simulated pearls.
To test a pearl to see if it is real or simulated, rub it lightly on your teeth. If the surface feels smooth it is fake, if it feels like a fine sand paper it is a real pearl.
Your pearls, whether they are fresh water or salt water (or fake!), should be the last thing you put on in the morning and the first thing you take off at night. Never spray yourself with perfume or hairspray or apply make-up while wearing your pearls!!!! It will ruin the nacre of the pearl, damage which is irreversible.
Clean your pearls with a soft dry cloth. Never soak your pearls in jewelry cleaning solution. If your pearl earrings or ring get gunky you can use water and a soft tooth brush to gently clean them, but you never want to get a strand of pearls wet.
The best way to string pearls is on knotted silk. The knots between each pearl allow a necklace or bracelet to lay naturally around your neck or wrist, and if the string breaks you wont loose all the pearls. If you wear your pearls every day, it is best to have them restrung every six months or so. If you wear them less often, the best sign that you need them restrung is when the pearls have lots of room to shift in between each knot or if the silk is looking dirty or dingy. Old dirty silk can really bring down the look of a beautiful pearl necklace.
Come in and take a look at some of our beautiful pearl necklaces, earrings, and bracelets!
 Silver green fresh water pearl bracelet with sterling silver clasp
Many people who come in to sell their gold ask, “Is now a good time? Is gold going to go up in price?”. The truth….NOBODY KNOWS! Sometimes gold will fluctuate with the stock market, sometimes the two act completely independent of each other. When the stock market crashed last year, gold shot up in price because people felt that gold would be a more solid investment. Then the price fell dramatically, with seemingly little cause. As I’m writing this gold is at $944 per troy ounce. By the end of next month it could be $200 more or less or exactly the same. My best advise is to start watching the gold price daily. If you can, check it a few times a day. You’ll start to see trends, and if you are planning on selling your gold, it will allow you to pick a good time to sell.
Some people who don’t want to sell their gold outright, want us to make a new piece of jewelry with their gold. Does Precious Metals do this? The short answer is no. We wont take your gold, melt it down, and make it into something else. If you melt down old gold from chains and other unwanted jewelry items, the end product tends to be brittle and difficult to work with. The solder and other impurities in the jewelry compromise the end product when it is re-melted. Some jewelers will do this, typically with the understanding that the product will be of lesser quality, but we’ve found it is more trouble than it is worth. What we will do is a metals exchange. If you give us 10 units of 14K gold jewelry, we’ll give you 9 units back in newly refined and alloyed 14K gold. Because we have to pay to have your 10 units of 14K gold jewelry refined, we deduct that one unit to cover this cost. This exchange can save you a lot of money if you are looking at making a new piece of jewelry, and the end product is of the best quality.
If you don’t want to lose the actual metal of your gold jewelry, we can redesign pieces, creating an updated and more wearable piece of jewelry. Your parents’ wedding bands can be turned into pendants or earrings, or they can be sized to fit you. Re-working a piece that you are no longer in love with is often less expensive that replacing it with a new piece, and it can be very satisfying to find a new love for a piece of jewelry you thought you would never wear again. I find that the soul of most jewelry is the stones, and at Precious Metals we specialize in taking stones from your old jewelry and using them in new and exiting ways. Stones that have been abraded from years of wear can often be re-cut to look like new. There are endless ways to “make over” your jewelry.
So you have some gold, and you call a few places to see what they are paying. My my post Shopping around has some information about the units (grams or pennyweights) that most gold buyers use and how to convert between the two. It also talks about gold content in the different carats, which is a factor in the price. But the main thing that determines price is the current market price for gold or spot gold price. Gold buyers will use that number to determine how much they pay. If they are a legitimate buyer, when the spot price goes up, so does what they will pay per pennyweight or gram, even if the jump in price is only a few dollars. If they quote you the same per unit price when gold is at $950 per troy ounce and at $900 per troy ounce, do not sell to them. Keep in mind that this is a competitive market, and you should be getting more money (even if it’s not much more) when the gold price is higher, period.
You can get current, and by that I mean up to the minute, gold prices at www.kitco.com. There is also an application that you can set up on your Google home page that will show you the current price anytime you access Google. The price will update every two to five minutes. It is best to check the price online through a site that will give you a current price, not just yesterday’s closing price. Gold can close one day at $900 and by noon the next day be at $870 or $960. That price is for pure or 24 karat gold per troy Ounce. A troy ounce is 10% heavier than a regular ounce. If you were to take a troy ounce of gold to the grocery store and put it on their butchers scale or to the post office and on a postage scale, it will weigh about 1.1 avoirdupois ounces. Once you start watching the gold price daily or hourly, you’ll see that it changes very, very quickly. It only takes a little time each day to watch for the price to increase, so that you get more for your gold.
Precious Metals will hold gold prices for you if you come in and get your gold sorted and weighed. Once we have a detailed record of what you have, if you watch the market and call when the price is what you want to sell at, we’ll hold that price for you for 48 hours. For example, you come in and have 10 pennyweights of 14K and gold is at $915. You keep your gold, and when the market reaches a number you like, let’s say $950, you call give us your name and amount of gold (10 dwt 14k) and we will pay you at $950 for the next 48 hours, even if gold drops to $850 in the next 10 hours. If you don’t come in within 48 hours, you lose the hold on the price. If you don’t call ahead, we only pay out at the current price. If for some reason you have more gold or less gold that when you came in before, and we have to do more sorting and testing, we pay at the current price. Keep in mind that a $10 jump in price will only amount to about an extra 17 cents for each pennyweight of 14K. So for that 10 pennyweights it is only an extra $1.70. But if you have 60 pennyweights or gold goes up by $100, those cents can start to add up.
Next in our Selling your gold series: Is now a good time? What if I don’t want to sell it, can you make something with my old gold?
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If you have some old gold to sell it is important to shop around. Due to high market values, the gold buying business has gotten very competitive in the past two years. Every one who buys gold has a different system for determining their prices, but almost all pay by unit of weight and karat. Call several places and ask them what they are currently paying for the standard karats of gold (10K, 14K, 18K etc.) Be wary of businesses that wont give you a price over the phone. Most legitimate buyers have a set formula and should be able to tell you a per gram or per pennyweight price. Some businesses have different prices for different quantities of gold, which will work against you if you only have a small amount of gold. Keep in mind that the market price changes about every ten minutes so the price could go up or down very quickly.
As for unit of weight, some use grams and some use pennyweights (dwt.). A pennyweight is 1/20 of a troy ounce. To convert grams to pennyweights multiply by .64301. To convert pennyweights to grams multiply by 1.5552. When you get pricing from different gold buyers, make sure to convert all of the prices into one unit before going with the highest bidder. Say you have 2dwt 14K gold, that is 3.11 grams. If someone says I’ll pay $14 a pennyweight that’s $28; if they say $14 a gram that’s $43.54.
Once you find the store which pays the most per unit, find out what their policies are. When it comes to selling gold, almost every buyer has a final sale policy. (See the last post about selling items of sentimental value). Some will pay cash, some by check. Some stores will pay more if you use the money as credit towards a purchase. Do they remove stones like diamonds, do they buy the diamonds, or do they leave the diamonds in the jewelry? Do they buy any jewelry as jewelry or only as scrap? Can they advise you on which pieces are better sold as jewelry and not scrap?
At Precious Metals we try to offer competitive pricing, but we would never claim to have the highest payout. First, there are too many gold buyers in Boston and its surrounding towns and cities to possibly know what they all pay. We also don’t negotiate pricing. Some buyers will offer you a low price, but will negotiate up to a higher one. They are hoping that the seller will take the low price without haggling. We offer one price to all of our customers who get paid by check. It is the highest price we can offer. We do, however, pay out more if the money is used towards a purchase or repair, but the entire amount must be used.
Why should you sell at Precious Metals?
Because we will tell you what to sell as scrap and what not to sell. If you have a nice necklace that you could get more money for if you sold it on ebay or craigslist, we’ll tell you. Not only that, we’ll help you. We can show you how to post on either of those popular websites, take close up pictures of your jewelry, and help you determine a fair asking price, at no charge. If you don’t want to sell online there are several consignment stores we can recommend as well.
Any stones that are easily removed we will remove at no charge. We will also give you an honest evaluation of the stones.
Our pricing structure is entirely transparent. We’ll go through the math with you from the market price to the price you are paid. If you don’t like the price we are offering, there are no obligations.
We pride our selves on our honesty and superior customer service. There are more than a few gold buyers who will be happy to buy your wearable jewelry at scrap prices and sell it on ebay or in their store for ten times what they paid you.
We buy gold at Precious Metals, and we get a lot of questions about the whole process. The nightly news is talking about how to sell your gold and showing hidden camera investigations. There are ads for mail-in services playing on every TV channel, and many jewelry stores have signs in their windows saying “We buy gold!” and “Highest Prices Paid!”. So, I’m going to break down the whole process in a series of posts.
What are you selling?
First of all, before you go to sell your gold you should have some idea of what it is that you are selling. If you take your jewelry to a pawn shop, consignment store, or estate jewelry store, you can sell your jewelry as jewelry. The price is determined by both the value of the materials as well as the workmanship or labor that went into producing the piece. If you take your jewelry to a store that proclaims “We Buy Gold!” like Precious Metals Sudbury, you are selling your jewelry as scrap metal. I don’t care if your jewelry has never been worn or has been run over by a car; it is all scrap to me. I don’t care if it is your class ring or an earring you found on the street, it all gets melted down. The price is determined by the pure gold content and the current price of gold.
All of this means two things.
1. If you have nice jewelry, pieces that have little wear and are stylish, you should not sell them for scrap. Sell them on E-Bay or Craigslist (Remember to be safe! Meet in public and cash only.) or your local consignment store. Let’s say you have a nice necklace with a little precious stone in it or a gold bracelet from Tiffany & Co., the scrap price will typically be less than half of what you could get selling it on E-bay. This is especially true for brand name jewelry. ANYTHING by Yurmin, Tiffany & Co., Judith Ripka, or any other big name designer is worth trying to sell as jewelry.
2. You don’t have to know the exact weight and gold content of your pieces, but you should have realistic expectations. With the market hovering around $900 per troy ounce, the average 14K gold wedding band will fetch $20 to $70 at scrap pricing. There just isn’t that much gold in one small to mid-sized ring, especially when you take into account that the ring is only part gold. 14 Karat gold (which is the most common karat in the U.S) is 14 parts pure gold and 10 parts other metal (copper and nickel). You will only get paid for the gold. 14 Karat is 58.3% gold, just over half. 10 Karat gold is only 41.7% gold, less than half. Is your mother’s wedding band really only worth $30? In gold scrap, yes, in your mind, probably not. Don’t sell anything that you can’t part with, because the money will never cover the loss of a family heirloom. And, don’t think that by waiting for gold prices to go higher you will get way more money. If your ring is $30 at $900/oz, even if gold goes up to $1400, you are still only going to get around $50 or $60. Chances are, if you have trouble parting with it at $30, you’ll have trouble at $60, and you just shouldn’t sell it. I can’t pay you for your sentiment, and once you sell it, your memories are gone.
Next….Shopping around and what determines price?
Emerald is known as the “stone of successful love”. It is said to provide for domestic bliss and to instil both sensitivity and loyalty. It is also said that emerald can enhance the memory.
Emeralds are a variety of the mineral beryl. When beryl is blue it is called Aquamarine, and it can also be found in shades of yellow (golden beryl), red (bixbite), and pink(morganite).
While emerald has a hardness of 7.5 to 8 out of 10 on the Mohs scale, which measures resistance to scratching, they are very brittle and prone to breaking. If you are going to invest in emerald jewelry, look for earrings and necklaces rather than abuse prone rings.
Most natural emeralds are treated, usually by soaking them in oil. The oil fills surface fissures and make the stone look more uniform. Never put your emeralds in an ultrasonic cleaner or use jewelry cleaner, as both can remove the oil and change the appearance of your stone. Clean your emeralds with lukewarm water and a soft toothbrush.
Synthetic emeralds have been available since 1964. They are the same chemical compound as a natural emerald, but have been created in a lab. They have fantastic color and are an affordable alternative to the natural stone.
To learn more click here.
Welcome to the Precious Metals’ blog! We’ll be posting updates about the store, current trends, pictures of jewelry we’ve made and jewelry we like. Thanks for visiting.
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