Is My Vintage Costume Jewelry Worth Anything?

Usually a little. Sometimes a lot. Most vintage costume jewelry sells for modest amounts, and the pieces that sell for real money share a handful of traits you can check at the kitchen table in five minutes. The materials aren’t what you’re pricing. The maker, the design, the construction, and the condition are.

The five-minute triage

Pour the box out on a towel, grab your phone for zooming in, and run each piece through these questions. The more yeses, the more attention the piece deserves.

1. Is it signed? Check the back of brooches, the clasp and the tag beside it on necklaces and bracelets, and the clip or post on earrings. A name like Trifari, Coro, Napier, Weiss, Eisenberg, or Miriam Haskell is your first clue.
2. Are the stones prong-set? Turn it over. Little metal claws holding each stone usually mean better construction than stones glued into cups.
3. Does it feel substantial? Weight, crisp detail, and clean finishing on the back are signs someone cared about the piece.
4. Is the plating intact? Worn spots where brass or copper shows through cut value hard.
5. Are all the stones present and bright? Missing stones, or stones gone gray and cloudy, are the most common value killers.
6. Is it part of a set? A matching necklace and earrings, or a brooch with its earrings, is often worth more together than apart.

What adds value, and what kills it

Condition matters more for costume jewelry than for gold, because there’s no metal value to fall back on. A slightly worn 14K chain is still worth its gold. A signed brooch with three dead stones has lost most of what made it collectible.

Signatures: helpful, not magic

A signature tells you who made it, which is the single biggest clue to value. But “signed” isn’t a price tier on its own. Some makers produced enormous quantities for decades, so their everyday pieces are easy to find and priced accordingly. Others made less, made it better, or made it earlier, and collectors compete for it.

Roughly, the names that draw the most collector attention include Miriam Haskell, Schiaparelli, Hattie Carnegie, Marcel Boucher, Eisenberg (especially early “Eisenberg Original” pieces), Joseff of Hollywood, and early Trifari, Coro, and Mazer designs. The widely produced names, like Sarah Coventry, Avon, Monet, Napier, and later Trifari and Coro, sell steadily, mostly at everyday prices, with standout designs doing better. Within any maker, the design and the era matter as much as the name.

Our guide to vintage costume jewelry marks shows what each maker’s signature looks like and how to use it to date a piece. If yours says Trifari, start with how to identify vintage Trifari.

Unsigned isn’t worthless

Plenty of good costume jewelry was never signed, or wore a paper tag that fell off decades ago. The best-known example is the rhinestone jewelry made by DeLizza & Elster in the 1960s, which is mostly unsigned and widely sold today as “Juliana” (the name of one of their lines, used loosely by sellers for anything that looks like their work). Czech glass jewelry is often unsigned, or marked only “Czechoslovakia.” With unsigned pieces, construction and design carry the value, and any attribution is an opinion, so price and buy accordingly.

What the price range really looks like

We’re not going to give you a price chart, because one would be wrong for most pieces. But a few public data points show the shape of the market, and all of them are either completed sales or clearly labeled as something else:

• The everyday end. Kovels, the long-running antiques price guide, notes that unmarked rhinestone butterfly brooches often sell for under $30. That’s typical of unsigned costume pieces in general.
• Big names don’t guarantee big money. At a Rago auction in February 2020, a Miriam Haskell necklace with a $300 to $500 estimate sold for $228. The maker was right; that design, on that day, wasn’t in demand.
• The right design can go much higher. Kovels reported a 1964 Trifari “Firebird” pin selling for $1,320 at Tarnova Auctions in Toronto. Same maker as the clip-on earrings in a thousand jewelry boxes; a very different design.
• Appraisals move. On Antiques Roadshow, a pair of 1940s Trifari “jelly belly” pins was given a retail appraisal of $1,400 to $4,800 in 2003, revised to $625 to $1,400 in 2018. An appraisal isn’t a sale, and collector markets change.

The lesson: the maker gets a piece noticed, and the specific design and its condition set the price.

How to check what yours would actually sell for

The most common mistake is pricing from asking prices. Searching a maker’s name on a shop site shows you what sellers hope to get, and the hopeful listings are the ones that don’t sell, so they pile up. You want completed sales.

Match carefully. Same maker isn’t enough; look for the same design, size, color, and condition. Ignore the single highest sale, which may have been two determined bidders on one day, and look for where most of the sales cluster. Our pricing guide goes deeper on comps and fees.

What to do with each pile

• Signed, great condition, collected maker: research sold prices for that exact design and list it individually with close-ups of the signature. Browse what’s already listed for makers like Trifari, Napier, or Sarah Coventry to see how other sellers describe them.
• Signed but everyday, or unsigned and well made: list individually if the design is strong, or group by theme (all brooches, all clip-on earrings).
• Damaged, single earrings, unsigned odds and ends: a jewelry lot is the honest home for these. Crafters and repairers buy them for parts.
• Anything stamped 10K, 14K, 18K, 925, or Sterling: that’s not costume. It has metal value; see our guide to what your jewelry is worth.

Not sure which pile something belongs in? What’s It Worth gives you a free estimate from a photo. Treat it as a starting point, then check sold comps before you set a price. And if you’re sorting a whole box that came from a relative, our guide to what to do with inherited jewelry covers the steps before selling.