I bought a fake!

January is rarely a fun month, and I haven't enjoyed this one much so far. When the going gets tough, the tough get sparkly, so I bought myself a brooch and earring set online as a pick-me-up. As a mood-lifter, £10 is pretty cheap, so what could possibly go wrong?


Fairly soon after it arrived, I started wondering if this set is a copy – and this is no reflection on the seller at all; service was excellent, the set arrived beautifully wrapped in tissue paper inside organza bags, and I believe the seller thought this was genuine vintage. The reason for my suspicion is that the pieces are fairly clumsily shaped, in a way that looks to me like someone made a mould from another set and then went about mass-producing them. The brooch isn't too bad, though the pin at the back doesn't look right, and is attached in a way I've never seen on a genuine vintage brooch.

If you look at the photo below, there's a genuine vintage Coro brooch on the left. See how the hinge of the pin, and the clasp end, are welded directly into the metal? Those components are part of the brooch, just like on the other vintage brooches I own. The new brooch is on the right, and the pin is a complete separate unit that's been attached to the front - and fairly crudely at that.

The earrings are pretty blobby, and they look to me like the original design would have had the 'spray' bits at the front linked by a solid supporting strut at the back, suggesting it was constructed from separate pieces of metal that were then combined to make the design. The mould for the copies got distorted and so on one earring the strut is no longer solid. The plastics are good quality, but different shapes on brooch and earrings: the brooch is flat, the earrings are cabochon.

Again, here's a comparison below. Genuine Coro, an earring from the new set, and an unsigned vintage one. See how the two vintage ones have cleanly flowing lines, so where there are swirls, the swirls are smooth. The top of the one in the middle, though, is clearly very wonky; the lines that should be evenly spaced simply aren't. And while the clip does resemble that of the unsigned one, that one has a little pad inside the clip for comfort, whereas the new one doesn't. Looking at my vintage clip earrings, the clips are placed so the corresponding clipping point on the front of the earring is substantial, something to press onto. On the new ones, the clip meets where the pattern is falling away - not the ideal clipping point.

I did a bit of Googling, as it had never occurred to me that people might be faking no-brand vintage costume jewellery. And it turns out faking does happen, though it seems to be most common in the cases of highly collectable brands and styles, such as Coro and Weiss (especially the Christmas tree brooches), where individual pieces can sell for hundreds of US dollars. Some of the most common signs are textured backs, and large plastic stones where originals would have been glass. I suspect the plastic elements in my set are the real deal, taken from damaged vintage jewellery – apparently this is not uncommon with fakes, where buyers pay attention to the quality of the stones. I did think the combination of diamante at the ends of the sprays and lucite in the centres was unusual!

As I didn't pay much for the set, I don't mind if it's a modern copy. I'm happy to wear repro dresses, after all. I'm more annoyed at being misled than anything else, and I don't think that was the seller's intention. At least I won't worry too much if one of the earrings falls down the loo at work – always a fear with clip-ons.

Caveat emptor, indeed. (And January, you're rubbish.)