Costume jewelry is often created with non-precious metals, usually gold or silver plated, and with or without beads and stones. Costume jewelry has been extremely popular around the world for thousands of years. The Ancient Egyptians are known to have worn decorative beaded necklaces and Cleopatra is probably one of the original wearers of what we now call costume jewelry. In more recent times the people of the Germanic and Slovak regions became highly skilled at developing intricate patterns in glass beads. However, beadwork used in costume jewelry is not only limited to glass.
A large variety of materials are traditionally used to make beads such as jet, wood, amber, gemstones, pottery, ceramic, metals, horn, coral, ivory, tortoiseshell and pearls. Some modern materials such as plastics, nylon and even polycarbonate variants are also used to make beads. Costume jewelry can be antique, period, or contemporary and there are many collectors of every style of costume jewelry. Venetian glass pieces of costume jewelry are particularly collectable as well as being extremely popular for people to wear.
Cleaning costume jewelry is extremely simple but needs to be done...