GUEST: It was my uncle's. He was a career army officer. He enlisted at the beginning of World War II, and he stayed in until 1961. He loved this, he wore it a lot, and he never married, never had children, so it was part of his estate, and his sister gave me all of the jewelry that he had, so that's when this came to me.
APPRAISER: And where was he stationed overseas?
GUEST: I don't know. I think he was in Japan for a while. I heard him talk about Macau, so I think he spent a lot of time traveling when he had leave.
APPRAISER: Well, that makes a lot of sense because when you see a jade ring, you say, "Okay." The really good stuff came from overseas from Japan, from China, that's really their diamond. I mean, people covet jade there the way we covet diamonds. Do you wear it?
GUEST: It's a little too big and bold for my taste.
APPRAISER: It's too big.
GUEST: My daughter loves it and I'm not sure that going clubbing with that ring is something that I'd prefer her to do.
APPRAISER: Well, it's a pretty tough stone. As you know, jade is very hard, and that's why it's loved also, and that makes it an important gemstone, just like diamond, which is very hard. The jade is cut in a cabochon-- that means unfaceted-- and that's typical. You would not really facet jade. And if I had to guess, this could have been cut maybe in the 1920s to the 1940s. It's very difficult without unmounting it to really determine that. As you can see, this is a beautiful color. It's very rich green. It appears to be very even, and that's one of the ways we judge it. But if you put a light on it, it starts to show a little bit of areas of white coming through, which tells us it's not perfectly green, so it takes it out of the category of a gemstone.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: However, it is so large. We never see jade rings in this size. It's pretty unusual. The color, the size, and pretty clean are very important. When I looked at it earlier, I looked at the markings on the inner ring, and it was marked "18K," but also it had Asian hallmarks, and they were for the purity of the gold. So both corroborate that it's 18 karat.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: And it came in a box with a retailer, not an important retailer. So I was hoping to see, you know, like Ming, some major house, but it is in the original box as you received it. Have you ever had the ring appraised before?
GUEST: Yes, when I got all of his jewelry eight or ten years ago, I had them appraised, and it was appraised at about $15,000.
APPRAISER: I'm very confident that this has not been impregnated or enhanced from the period from the jade that I've seen, but of course without a 100% test, we can't be sure. So in the market today, I'm going to give you a range, because it's very hard to pinpoint it because of the size. I would say you're looking at an auction evaluation of $60,000 to $80,000.
GUEST: Wow, I think I'll have to raise my insurance rates. (laughing)
