Most Wanted

Donna Chambers’s new sterling line features the same beautiful antique mother-of-pearl game chips starting at $200 instead of $600.

Red Carpet

Real-life interpretations of celebrity jewels

For A Good Cause

Nancy Grando, president, GRANDO JEWELRY, Los Angeles, has reintroduced her Jewelry With A Heart line of pins and pendants to raise money for heart disease research. Launched several years ago, Grando’s line has had a low profile until a recent meeting with a former business associate persuaded her to reenergize sales. Grando relaunched the line 10 days before Valentine’s Day 2010, though none of her 500 retail accounts currently carries it. The jewelry is available in sterling silver, 18k gold, and platinum, and some pieces feature diamonds. In silver, suggested retail prices start at $100. Twenty percent of net proceeds are donated to the Los Angeles Chapter of the American Heart Association.

“My grandmother died at age 57 of a heart attack,” says Grando. “She was a wonderful woman who was there for everyone but didn’t take care of herself, which is so often the case with women.”

Birthstone Trivia

The carat, the standard unit of weight for diamonds and other gemstones, takes its name from a particular type of seed. Because these small seeds had a fairly uniform weight, early gem traders used them as counterweights in their balance scales. The modern metric carat, equal to 0.2 grams, was adopted by the United States in 1913 and other countries soon after. What type of seed am I?