GUEST: This brooch belonged to my husband's great-grandmother in Russia. She passed away before her daughter could come to America, but it was one of the few things that she brought over with her when she came in 1911.
APPRAISER: The thing is, there's no definitive hallmarks on it to say that it is Russian, but it's most definitely Eastern European. And I heard you saying you were wondering if they're diamonds or not.
GUEST: Yes, we've always thought that they were glass.
APPRAISER: All right, well, there's a meter I have here, and if the needle moves up into the green, they're diamonds. If it doesn't move, they're glass. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to come over here and I'm going to push this stone right here. It doesn't move, it's glass.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: Interesting, right?
GUEST: Well, that's exactly what we thought, so...
APPRAISER: Right, right, but you know what? You thought wrong.
GUEST: Oh.
APPRAISER: Because I want you to watch this, all right? Watch the center stone.
GUEST: Oh, wow.
APPRAISER: That's a diamond.
GUEST: Oh, my goodness.
APPRAISER: That's what they call a rose cut diamond. Usually, they're set very low in an all-silver mounting. The bottom of the stone is foil, so to make it reflect. And we never get to show people what it really looks like from the bottom.
GUEST: This one's flat.
APPRAISER: It's flat, they're like a surfboard. So if we take it to show everybody, because it's flat, it's not as much as it looks like. It looks like it's a three- and-a-half carat diamond. It probably weighs about two carats. Just in the center stone, you have $2,000 to $3,000.
GUEST: Oh, my goodness.
APPRAISER: That's actually the desirable part of the pin.
GUEST: Wow.
APPRAISER: And then you have another $500 in the mounting with the other diamonds.
GUEST: So aside from that one stone, the rest of them are also diamonds?
APPRAISER: They're also diamonds, yeah.
GUEST: Oh, my goodness, wow.
APPRAISER: So at auction, the whole thing would probably be $2,500 to $3,500.
GUEST: Wow.
APPRAISER: It is diamonds.
GUEST: Awesome.
APPRAISER: (laughing): Pretty cool, huh?
GUEST: Very cool.
