After work­ing out this slightly snow-dusted Sun­day morn­ing, I was cruis­ing Style.com in a lazy way, kind of float­ing around a bit to find some unplanned affla­tus (if they use some­thing like Vis­Trac to mon­i­tor the site, sorry…I was not your typ­i­cal surfer), and stum­bled upon the infomercial-like adver­tis­ing Conde Nast prof­fers as style advice under the very, cool, very slick, very real­ity tv savvy title, “The Styl­ist”. The cloth­ing these hired guns (styl­ists) pro­mote (the tal­ented and affa­ble Kate Young is among them) is from Dil­lards, and the jew­elry is Tous. Kate’s lan­guage is too repet­i­tive in the begin­ning of each seg­ment, yet she has a prac­ti­cal down-to-earthiness about clothes that can be trans­lated to any­thing in your closet that is sim­i­lar in sil­hou­ette or trend.

The jew­elry advice is another mat­ter entirely. The seg­ment devoted to sil­ver and gold, hosted by styl­ists Masha Mandzuka and Anda Gen­tile (“celebrity” styl­ists), was utterly devoid of ser­vice­able com­men­tary. At one junc­ture, Anda mum­bles, “…gold comes off as a lit­tle too bling-y.”

Uh-huh.

Yes, gold can be bright and on occa­sion, too play­ful for a day­time look, how­ever there are women for whom a bold, glit­tery expres­sion is an intrin­sic part of their uni­form. But tex­tured gold is some­thing every­one can wear and there are many, many options, from bloomed gold of the Vic­to­rian period to some­thing con­tem­po­rary and soft, like the buffed fin­ish Gurhan jew­els have, so I will have to agree to dis­agree with Anda about gold for daytime.

Then there was another silly dis­cus­sion about sil­ver, which the two women dis­missed as too casual for evening, and more appro­pri­ate for day­time. Funny, no one in the Geor­gian period (1730−1830) thought so; dia­monds were set in sil­ver. When the tech­nol­ogy for work­ing plat­inum improved dur­ing the very early twen­ti­eth cen­tury, jew­elry took on a whole dif­fer­ent appear­ance; it was light, del­i­cate, and set with white and watery-hued gem­stones. Plat­inum is more rare (valu­able) than gold, hence the idea that white metal is more for­mal than yel­low followed.

The white met­als, sil­ver, white gold, and the whole plat­inum fam­ily (osmium, rhodium, plat­inum, pal­la­dium, irid­ium) are equally wear­able, around the clock; each is a dif­fer­ent shade of white (white gold is more white than nat­ural plat­inum which slides towards grey) and so it pays to try on, peer into the mir­ror, and deter­mine what you pre­fer. Most of the time, it really depends on what you are wear­ing and how that par­tic­u­lar orna­ment looks on you. Pearls and gem­stones change the per­spec­tive entirely, con­sider this, it adds yet another dimen­sion to the over­all pic­ture. Again, tex­ture lev­els the play­ing field here, exper­i­ment a little.

Please don’t be deterred from wear­ing a great piece of jew­elry by purely objec­tive or arbi­trary advice. How you wear some­thing is just as key as what you are wear­ing. What you pair it with, your hair and skin color, your cloth­ing, and your per­son­al­ity all play an impor­tant part in the scheme of things. In the com­ing posts I will be talk­ing about how to work what you already own in your jew­elry box into cur­rent fash­ion trends. Now is the time to exca­vate those recesses and see what you’ve got. I’ll bet you will be surprised…