courtesy m3DigitalImaging
It always begins with the Crystal.
There’s more than one reason your jewelry looks so good when you get it and will still be so beautiful many years down the road: quality materials and artisan techniques.
Each piece from Stefanie Somers is handcrafted using traditional jewelry making techniques, right here in our Texas studio. You won’t find any off-shore mass-produced items in our collection. Most of our designs are made here from scratch, every time – cut one at a time from the raw materials as they’re ordered. Select designs are cast from our handmade models and then stoned by hand.
We can't talk about our materials without first mentioning our crystal. You know the name - but right now, we're afraid we can't mention it. It's spectacular, and we have a longstanding direct relationship of over 25 years with this amazing company.
With the library of crystal colors and shapes at our disposal, we can bring you the most classic palettes to the most up-to-the-minute fashion stories. From office and teleconference looks to dinner to the red carpet and beyond, the artists of Stefanie Somers® are your secret weapon for fashion styling with a unique flair, your own personal assistant to outshine the competition, wherever you may find it.
We even have an impressive library of vintage crystal - much going back to pre-WWII vintage - that greatly expands our capabilities.
Our metals...
BRASS – The workhorse metal upon which we build our fantasies. When we build a design from the ground up here in our studio we begin with sheet brass, an alloy of copper with a bit of zinc for strength. Strong stuff, we can cut the most intricate designs imaginable and polish to a shiny mirror finish. When we have the piece completed, textured and polished, a final plating n rhodium or gold is the last step before stoning.
Brass is strong. Durable. But it's not especially pretty. Our plating metals make a world of difference - and we do all our plating in-house so we can control the quality.
PALLADIUM – A precious metal in the platinum family, Palladium is our go-to for most of our “white” or “silver” plating. Hard, durable, bright and easily polished, and with all the hypo-allergenic qualities of Rhodium, Palladium offers a more stable pricepoint – it’s not as efficient in the automative or aeronautics industries as its cousin rhodium, so there's less competition and volatility.
14k GOLD – This one you know well. Our “yellow” pieces are all plated in 14k yellow gold. Gold is much softer by nature than rhodium, so please do treat your gold-plated pieces especially gently, and make sure to store them separately, away from each other. Even solid gold will scratch, and so of course will gold plated jewelry.
ROSE GOLD – Rose Gold plating is simply gold with a slightly different alloy of metals in the mix. While yellow gold is 58% gold alloyed with a mix of 42% other metals (nickel, copper, silver & zinc), Rose Gold is alloyed mainly with copper, with usually a touch of silver. The extra copper provides a soft reddish glow to the metal that can be especially beautiful with the Rosegold family of crystals.
RUTHENIUM – A darker "gunmetal" grey, Ruthenium is a spectacular look when paired with black or grey crystal - and makes for unique looks when selected for various shades if you're looking for a special piece with your own signature twist. Ruthenium is also a member of the Platinum family of metals, and is also hypo-allergenic.
RHODIUM – Odds are good that you’ve never heard of rhodium before, but they’re even better that you already own some. A relative of platinum, Rhodium is easily the most precious (and expensive) metal on the planet, trading as high as $30,000 per ounce (that’s no typo – thirty thousand dollars for a single ounce).
How might you own rhodium already? If you drive a car, it will be in the catalytic converter. In addition to being supremely hard and shiny – and durable – rhodium is also the best material known to filter impurities out of automotive emissions. That’s right – rhodium keeps the air you breathe cleaner. That’s what keeps it in such high demand. Its use as a jewelry metal is only a very small portion of its overall footprint. Nearly as hard as diamond, tarnish resistant and naturally hypo-allergenic, rhodium is the ideal material to bring a bright look to jewelry. It’s our “white” finish of choice, plating nearly of our jewelry. Because of its toughness and strength, rhodium plating is extremely durable, giving very long wear.
Due to it’s increasingly volatile price, as of 2021 we use Rhodium plating only by special order. Should you prefer Rhodium, it is available as an option at a variable surcharge depending on the spot market at the time of order. Please inquire.
Finally, our posts & earwires...
We take special care here, because we know how miserable it can be when ears get itchy. While we can't absolutely 100% beyond a shadow of a doubt guarantee that you won't have any problems with our posts and wires, we can tell you that we very, very rarely get a complaint. We use the highest quality posts we can get - and if you DO have a problem, we hope you'll let us know.
TITANIUM – All of our posts are hypo-allergenic, using either Titanium or Surgical Steel. Titanium is an amazing lightweight metal that’s naturally hypo-allergenic. A natural heat-sink, it was used in the thermal tiles on the space shuttle. You’ll most often find titanium posts on our cast designs. Very comfy on the ears!
SURGICAL STEEL – Our other preferred earpost material, we use Surgical Steel posts on the designs we fabricate completely from scratch. As the name suggests, these posts are safe for all to wear.
Lastly... all of our CLIP EARRINGS ship with the most wonderful pads, and are designs to be FLAT-to-FLAT clips. You'll never see a "knuckle-buster" style clip on anything from SSC - those painful things that try to drill a hole into your lobes.
For designs that are too small to accommodate a clip, we offer these very cool little Rare Earth Magnets that give the look of posts with requiring a piercing. A small upcharge unfortunately, but if you're not pierced they are the bomb. (take it from Stefanie herself, whose holes closed up years ago!)
There you have it. The nuts and bolts of what we use to create the fantasy. The rest is our own special faerie dust...