About this time, too, short sleeves led to an increased use of bracelets, often worn several on one arm. Especially popular has been the bangle bracelet, a band of gold from which are suspended coins, figures of men and animals, and other tokens and mementos. Sometimes golden disks are engraved with sentimental designs or sayings; sometimes the words are humorous, the figures grotesque.
Platinum and more recently palladium have been increasingly used as basic metals for the new jewelry, along with the now less frequent silver and the constant gold.
Spurred by René Lalique, the impetus of modern art has been felt in jewelry design. Cubic, non-representational, and other modes of abstract form have helped shape the modern bracelet, earclip, watch, and the case for powder, cigarettes, lighter, or the watch. While some jewels thus manifest the modern modes, others draw freely on the beauty of the past, as stimulus to the creation of fresh patterns of beauty for our day.
CHAPTER 2
What the Stones Are
What the Stones Are
On the basis of beauty, stones cannot be divided into precious and semiprecious for, from stone to stone, there is continuous range of color and glow. Nor indeed can price be the one criterion, for here many elements produce variety. Although the term “gem of the first water” is reserved for the flawless blue-white diamond, as the carats of the single stone increase the flawless ruby and the emerald become even more costly; and varieties and special specimens of other stones, such as the fire opal and imperial jade, move up into comparable range. For certain individuals, of course, a particular stone will have associations of sentiment that render it more precious—in the nontechnical sense—than another stone in the category of “precious.” It is, then, tradition rather than any inherent value that sets a secondary label, “semiprecious,” on all but five of the stones used for human adornment. Let us call these five the gems, to distinguish them from the other stones.