The allure wasn’t shiny. It was dull. And green. And quick.
It was a Friday afternoon, and the world seemed to be imploding. I was in one of those “What am I doing with my day/week/life?” moods, the kind where everything feels existential. So, I reminded myself that jewelry was meant to financially support me, and there were several avenues to realize that goal. I decided it was time to melt some “Grandma gold.”
Gold was trading at over $4,500 an ounce.* Grandma had been dead for two years. I had already set aside the pieces of hers I would wear and enjoy. As for the rest, melting felt like the reasonable, rational choice for a financially literate adult to make.
When I first started going to the metal scrap yard, it was mostly to dispose of loose ends from jewelry projects in exchange for modest handfuls of cash I use to keep the business humming. I’d joke to friends that it was the Diamond District’s version of the ATM. It didn’t feel like a cash grab strictly for the sake of cash-grabbing—until gold kept going up, and up, and up.
The first time I went, I watched an older religious Jewish man hand over large silver Judaica pieces that resembled precious family heirlooms. I tried to shake the visual parallels to pre-war times, with scenes from the film Monsieur Klein coming to mind. It felt strange standing in line to reduce our histories to a price per troy ounce.
Eventually, the routine became less startling. Perhaps I had simply grown accustomed to the choreography of it all—or perhaps I just liked the cash. Yet, on this particular Friday, I decided to melt a piece I’d previously sworn I would keep, along with some other bits. I’d argued (to myself) they would never come back into fashion, they would require expensive refurbishment to be wearable, and, frankly, they were heavy and should hence be worth a decent sum.
But that day, I felt like I was chasing fool’s gold. I was sure the heaviest piece I scrapped was 18-karat gold (it had been married to an 18k antique chain), but the XRF Gun politely informed me it was only 8.9 karats. The others, a mix of 10k and 14k, simply didn’t add up to very much. The math was sound; the satisfaction was not.
I walked away with a reasonable amount of cash, but also with a reasonable amount of guilt. I felt personally responsible for erasing techniques and craftsmanship that simply don’t exist today. It ran counter to my entire ethos of celebrating, studying, and preserving the past. Instead of honoring history, I was flattening it into scrap.
I turned the corner to sulk while inhaling the most pitiful of fast-casual lunch wraps. As I chewed my way through disappointment, I thought about the antique jewelry vendors who have feelers out for me on exceptional antique chains, 19th-century French or English / Victorian, which I love using in my THEN & NOW Collection. They’ve been quiet and apologetic. They acknowledge the scarcity; when they do get their hands on anything, they often have to charge more than they used to believe it was worth. And that’s largely because so much is being melted down in rooms like the one I just left.
This, ultimately, is what my THEN & NOW Collection is trying to honor: not just gold as a commodity, but as part of objects that have outlived empires. Many of the antiquities I work with were completed centuries—sometimes millennia—before I was born, yet they arrive in my studio as elegant as any contemporary artwork. They remind me that adornment has always been a language used to signal power, protection, and belief. When I decide whether to preserve or melt, I’m really deciding how much of those layered histories I’m willing to keep in circulation, rather than disappearing into today’s spot price.
Obviously, my hope for this world is that geopolitics stabilize and human rights abuses—fueled by massive male egos and power hunger—dwindle. I’m under no illusion that my decision to keep or melt Grandma’s bracelet will tip the global scales.
Still, there is something quietly profound about working with a substance influential enough to back federal reserves, yet intimate enough to sit against a pulse on someone’s wrist. For me, for now, holding the past in the palm of my hand does more than a wad of cash ever could.
The verdict is in: if I can’t have Grandma back, I’m going to keep her gold.
*For context, it was under $2,000 per ounce when I decided to pursue jewelry design. Today, it surpassed $5,000 per ounce.