Cameo

I thought this was silver with a worn gold finish but the test was negative. So I tested it for gold. It was a strong positive for 10K. It was positive for 14K, however, it was slightly faded compared to the 10K. Could this in between? I did the test again using a very worn area. I wanted to make sure I wasn't getting a positive from the worn yellow surface gold. It was still positive.

I don't see any markings at all for gold. Isn't that strange? There is a vertical concave shape on the back at the top. Do you think something fell off there that could have had the mark? I would appreciate your opinions. Thanks you.

 

It's costume. This is yet another copy of what joolies call Ponytail Girl. She's never seen in real settings, only costume, and they were made in the thousands. The cameo itself is resin and probably dates to the 70s. Oddly, some of these settings do fool a gold acid test sometimes, but if you put a bit on the back it will probably fizz up green.

 

Thanks, good to know. I will test it on the back. Honestly, I was so shocked that it tested positive. The resin fooled me too. How can you tell so I don't fall for it again? I only paid $1 so I'm not going to lose any sleep.

 

That image is always resin or almost; I've never even seen it in glass. There's another one often called German Headband Girl that's always costume too. She comes in glass, generally, and gets her name from the glass cameos being mostly made in Germany. The real shell cameos are easy to spot when you've seen a few, and the metal is also a question mostly of "getting your eye in". I can spot the real deal at 20 feet, for the most part, at least when it comes to the cameos themselves.

This is Headband Girl.

 

I don't think headband girl would have fooled me.

I have a lot of cameos from Italy so I'm going to pull them out and set them side by side for comparison to see if I can spot the difference in the resin.

 

Carved shell cameos are curved on the back because the shell is curved. If a cameo is flat on the back it is either glass, ceramic, resin or hard stone. The tooth tap test will give resin away in a second

 

Thank you!

 

Great information everyone, Thank You, Joy.

 

There are also small bubbles visible in the white part of the cameo.

 

Yes, a lot of bubbles and even a resin blob (hairdo, top) were the first thing I noticed. Even a large bubble on the nose.
The other sign of a cast cameo is that the 'carving' doesn't go underneath places like the chin, neck, lock of hair.

 

A lot of times you can see a seam where the colors were glued together too. Every once in a while you'll find a costume one with the bottom piece made of
"random pretty rock" and an applied profile. Those are rarer. The shell cameos are valued based on the quality of the carving, the size, and the quality of the setting. It always burns me when someone takes a nice cameo and melts the karat gold or sterling setting, unless the setting was broken somehow.