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Material World
Application

Jewellery and adornment

The oldest use any material has been put to that was not survival — and the one where the selection criteria are appearance, durability and scarcity, in that order and rarely admitted.

Adornment is the application that selects for properties nothing else values. A structural material is chosen for what it can carry; a jewellery material is chosen for what it looks like, whether it survives being worn every day for fifty years, and whether it is rare enough that owning it means something.

The third criterion is the one that makes this application unlike any other. Scarcity is not a material property — it is a fact about supply — and it is why aluminium was worth more than gold in the 1850s and worth nothing by 1890. Nothing about the metal changed. The Hall–Héroult process changed, and aluminium fell out of the jewellery case and into the beverage can.

Durability is the criterion most often ignored and most expensive to ignore. A ring is worn against a desk, a door and a dishwasher for decades, which is a harsher mechanical environment than most engineering components see. Opal, malachite, pearl and amber all fail it, and are worn anyway.

Uses

Two families of material, chosen on entirely different grounds.

The metals are the structure: gold, silver, platinum and, more recently, titanium and steel. What is wanted is a metal that does not corrode against skin, is soft enough to be worked cold and hard enough to hold a stone, and gold is very nearly alone in doing all three. It is alloyed down — 18 carat is 75% gold — because pure gold is too soft to hold a setting, not to save money, though it does that too.

The stones are the display: diamond, corundum as ruby and sapphire, beryl as emerald and aquamarine, quartz in a dozen varieties, and the organic materials that predate all of them.

The organic ones came first by a long way. Amber, jet, shell and ivory were being worked in the Upper Palaeolithic, tens of thousands of years before any technology existed that could cut corundum. They are soft, which is exactly why — a material a flint blade can shape is a material available to everyone, and the hard stones had to wait for abrasives.

Economic significance

Jewellery is where roughly half of all gold demand goes in a normal year, and it is the single largest use of platinum after autocatalysts. For diamond it is close to the whole market by value, though not by weight — most diamond mined is industrial grade and ends up on a saw blade.

That concentration makes the trade unusually exposed to arguments about provenance, and it has produced the most developed origin-tracking machinery of any material sector: the Kimberley Process for rough diamond, CITES listings for coral and ivory, and recycled-gold certification. None of them works as well as its documentation claims, and all of them exist because the buyer of an ornament, unlike the buyer of a bearing, can be moved by where it came from.

Medium confidence Weak evidence

How we know: checked recently · only one source, so there is nothing to cross-check it against · stated directly by the source.

How this connects

Where a connection has been confirmed by an outside reference, that reference is named beside it.

uses

  • Amber — material · worked since the Upper Palaeolithic, and traded the length of Europe before anyone smelted a metal
  • Jet — material · and effectively nothing else: an entire industry of 1,400 people at Whitby that existed because Victoria wore mourning for forty years, and collapsed when the convention did
  • Nacre — material · as inlay above all — furniture, instruments, and the position markers on nearly every guitar fingerboard
  • Pearl — material · the only gem that arrives finished, and the only major one whose market was destroyed and rebuilt by learning to farm it
  • Precious coral — material · cut as beads and cabochons, and worked at Torre del Greco continuously since the eighteenth century
  • Ivory — material · historically, and recorded as history: international commercial trade in elephant ivory has been banned since 1990
  • Diamond — mineral · and the market is close to the whole of diamond's value while being a small fraction of its tonnage — most diamond mined is industrial grade and ends up on a saw blade
  • Ruby — mineral variety · corundum coloured by chromium, and hard enough at 9 to be worn daily for a lifetime without visible wear
  • Sapphire — mineral variety · the same mineral as ruby, and the same argument for wearing it
  • Emerald — mineral variety · and almost always fractured and oiled, because beryl grows with inclusions and the trade has treated them for centuries
  • Amethyst — mineral variety · the commonest good gemstone there is, and worth a fraction of what it was before Brazilian supply arrived in the 1800s
  • Gold — element · roughly half of all gold demand in a normal year, alloyed down to 18 or 14 carat because pure gold is too soft to hold a setting
  • Silver — element · the affordable noble metal, and the one that tarnishes, which is the whole of the trade-off
  • Platinum — element · denser, harder to work and more expensive than gold, and it holds a stone more securely, which is why the setting is platinum even when the band is not

Sources

  • Wikidata
    Wikimedia Foundation · Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (public domain dedication)
  • Material World
    Our own writing

Questions this page answers

Where it comes from, and what it becomes

Follow Jewellery and adornment back to what it starts as, and forward into what it becomes. Each step is a documented one — a real route material takes, not a chain of inference.

Upstream — what it comes from

  • Jewellery and adornment → uses (the affordable noble metal, and the one that tarnishes, which is the whole of the trade-off) → Silver → is sourced from (from the anode slimes of copper electrorefining, the same stream the platinum group and the tellurium come out of) → Copper → is produced by (as blister copper, refined electrolytically afterwards) → Smelting → takes as input (as the element removed, not added) → Oxygen → is produced by (the largest output by tonnage, and the reason air separation units sit beside steelworks) → Air separation
  • Jewellery and adornment → uses (roughly half of all gold demand in a normal year, alloyed down to 18 or 14 carat because pure gold is too soft to hold a setting) → Gold → is sourced from (a significant share of world gold arrives this way, recovered from copper anode slimes at no mining cost of its own) → Copper → is produced by (as blister copper, refined electrolytically afterwards) → Smelting → takes as input (as the element removed, not added) → Oxygen → is produced by (the largest output by tonnage, and the reason air separation units sit beside steelworks) → Air separation
  • Jewellery and adornment → uses (denser, harder to work and more expensive than gold, and it holds a stone more securely, which is why the setting is platinum even when the band is not) → Platinum → is produced by (collected in the slimes, where the copper's own refining concentrates it) → Electrorefining → takes as input (as impure smelted anodes, around 99% copper, which is not pure enough for wire) → Copper → is produced by (as blister copper, refined electrolytically afterwards) → Smelting → takes as input (roasted to drive off sulfur, then reduced to copper) → Chalcopyrite
  • Jewellery and adornment → uses (worked since the Upper Palaeolithic, and traded the length of Europe before anyone smelted a metal) → Amber → is sourced from (the same material, forty million years later: the volatiles gone and the remainder cross-linked into a network that no longer dissolves) → Resin → is produced by (as tall oil rosin from the black liquor — a by-product of making paper, and now a larger source than tapping) → Kraft pulping → takes as input (with sodium sulfide, breaks the lignin into fragments soluble in the alkaline liquor) → Sodium hydroxide → is sourced from (electrolysis of brine, which produces chlorine in fixed proportion) → Halite
  • Jewellery and adornment → uses (and effectively nothing else: an entire industry of 1,400 people at Whitby that existed because Victoria wore mourning for forty years, and collapsed when the convention did) → Jet → is sourced from (the Toarcian shales of the Yorkshire coast, where it occurs as flattened lenses within the black organic-rich mudstone that records the same anoxic seafloor) → Shale → is composed of (the clay minerals that make up most of the rock, and whose flat particles give it its splitting) → Clay → is sourced from (clay is chiefly what feldspar becomes when it weathers) → Orthoclase
  • Jewellery and adornment → uses (the only gem that arrives finished, and the only major one whose market was destroyed and rebuilt by learning to farm it) → Pearl → is composed of (the same material as the shell lining, deposited in concentric layers around an irritant instead of in sheets against a shell) → Nacre → is sourced from (built from calcium and carbonate the animal takes out of the water it is sitting in, which is why nacre quality tracks water quality directly) → Seawater → is composed of (about 96.5 per cent by mass — seawater is 3.5 per cent dissolved solids and the rest of it is this) → Water

These are the most distinct paths back. Jewellery and adornment can be traced through others besides.