Appraisal: Raymond Yard Platinum & Diamond Ring, ca. 1940

GUEST: It is my great-grandmother's ring.

GUEST: And then my great-grandmother gave it to my grandmother, and she said to my grandmother, "I will only give you this ring if you wear it, because beautiful things were meant to be worn."

So she used to wear it every day, and twice she was, um, out for the night, and she was robbed, and they took tons of other stuff, and they left this ring, because they thought it was costume jewelry.

APPRAISER: It's not costume jewelry.

GUEST: Oh, ho, yay!

APPRAISER: Yeah, it is a diamond, it is a diamond.

GUEST: Okay, okay.

APPRAISER: And it's in platinum.

GUEST: Okay.

APPRAISER: It weighs five-and-a-half carats.

It's kind of an average color, like, IJ.

GUEST: Mm-hmm.

APPRAISER: The reason it looks whiter, it has some fluorescence, which in some worlds is a bad thing, how it reacts to U.V.

light-- in this case, it's really a positive thing.

It makes the stone look whiter and brighter.

You got these wonderful sapphires and diamonds on the side.

Beneath the ring guard, it says Yard.

And Yard was the jeweler to the Rockefellers.

GUEST: (gasps): No way.

APPRAISER: Yeah, seriously.

GUEST: Oh, I got a little chill.

APPRAISER: Whoo!

GUEST: Oh, that's kind of cool.

Okay.

(laughs) APPRAISER: Okay, so cool.

So you had an evaluation on this ring.

GUEST: Yes.

APPRAISER: For?

GUEST: So in the '80s, they said it was $40,000.

And then, um, in, like, 2010, they said it was around $20,000, maybe a little less, so... APPRAISER: Right here, right now?

GUEST: Mm-hmm.

APPRAISER: At auction...

GUEST: Yes.

APPRAISER: $75,000 to $100,000.

GUEST: (gasps): No way!

Wow, that's kind of exciting.

That's kind of, like, chill-making, yeah!

(both laugh) GUEST: Whew!

Okay, I need to go put it in a safe deposit box or do something now, I mean... (laughs) I've just been carrying it around in my backpack for a week.