Whenever I catch up with any of my jeweller friends these days, at some point the conversation always turns to the price of silver and how ghastly it has been lately.

If you don’t know, silver is a precious metal commodity with prices that fluctuate regularly. The same way the petrol you put in your car is a certain price one day, then the next day it can be 50c a litre more expensive (or cheaper if you’re lucky).

Well silver is the same, with pricing affected by a wide range of global influences, and I’m no economist, so I won’t bore you with the details (in truth, I don’t know all the details because they bore me too). But what I do know is that the price of silver has been on a steady rise for the last few years, and almost tripled in the last year alone!

You can enjoy looking at the graph for yourself here.

As I write this, the price has actually dropped ever so slightly over the last 2 days, but it’s still sitting at $132.95 per troy ounce (31.1g), so approximately $4.27 per gram. However, because that fine silver (99.9% purity) gets processed into sterling silver (92.5% silver, 7.5% copper), and turned into sheet and wire, and everything else we need to make our jewellery, we end up paying about $6 - $7 per gram. Yikes.

(How many of you are looking at your jewellery right now and thinking of weighing it?)

So where am I going with this? Why do you need to know this technical nonsense and how much silver costs per gram? Well what you need to know is that it costs more for jewellers to source the metal, and the price has escalated so much that we cannot absorb the costs anymore, so need to make conscious choices to adapt. For me, one change is to focus more on alternative materials. I have been working with some copper and titanium for a while now, but my new designs will feature those metals more heavily, with silver only getting a sneaky look-in here and there. And of course, in general, the prices of finished silver pieces will go up, that’s unavoidable.

So keep this in mind when you next go to a market, or shop online, or see jewellery in your favourite shop - please don’t go wild about the prices, but instead try and understand what’s going on behind the scenes, and spare a thought for the jewellers who still need to make a living. But also, perhaps reframe how you think about buying jewellery - silver is a durable metal that will last a lifetime and beyond, so buy your jewellery with intention and care. It may cost a bit more, but you now own a special keepsake, a treasure, an investment, to keep with you for a long time.

Also remember that silver and gold do not automatically make jewellery precious - preciousness, just like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder and can be different for everyone. Jewellery can become quite embedded with emotion, connection and memory, all raising the value of a piece way above the dollar value of its materials. I have a ‘brooch’ made by my niece who would have been around 6 years old at the time, made from a carrot cut out of paper sticky-taped to a clothes peg - and it’s one of my most treasured pieces of contemporary jewellery that I own! I have seen jewellery made from plastic, old steel, fabric and buttons, that give people so much joy, acting as a reminder that even though we all like a bit of shiny sparkle, that is not the be-all and end-all of jewellery.

Perhaps now is the time to bring some variety in your jewellery box

…and let’s all hope those silver prices keep going down!