What Makes a Piece of Fine Jewellery an Heirloom?

What is a piece of fine jewellery for?

The trade has a ready answer, and it is occasions. An anniversary, an engagement, a fortieth birthday, a first child. Walk into almost any jeweller in the country and the entire architecture of the room — the cases, the copy, the questions you're asked — is organised around the occasion you've come in to mark. It is a serviceable answer. It is also, I think, the wrong one, and the difference matters more than it first appears.

An occasion is marked in an afternoon. A card marks it. A dinner marks it. If marking the moment were the job, jewellery would be a spectacularly inefficient way to do it — the most durable materials on earth, worked over weeks by hand, to do what a restaurant booking does. The expense only makes sense if the piece is doing something else. It is. A piece of jewellery is not for marking a moment. It is for fixing one — holding it in place long after everyone who was present has stopped being able to explain it.

That is the honest answer to the question, and it changes what you should buy, how you should buy it, and what you should demand of the house you buy it from.