I’m So Over Heavy Metal

I am so over heavy metal. That is the clever play on words that the Palladium Alliance International (PAI), the trade organization for palladium jewelry, has created as their tagline for a mult-million dollar advertising campaign that began this month.

The tagline references both the lightness of palladium and the connection to heavy metal music of the three glamorous stars who are the faces of the campaign. Pamela Anderson (ex-wife of  Motley Crue drummer, Tommy Lee), Kelly Osbourne (daughter of Black Sabbath lead singer, Ozzy Osbourne) and Rose McGowan (former girlfriend of heavy metal rocker Marilyn Manson) each have their individual very glamorous ads touting the appeal of palladium jewelry.

Read more about why we agree with these beautiful women and love to create palladium jewelry.

Sorella Jewelry FAQs

When you offer a complicated product like personalized jewelry with as many as options as we do, there are bound to be a lot of questions from customers. We’ve worked hard to provide extensive descriptive and informational documentation throughout the site, and now we’ve finally put together a page of Frequently Asked Questions that provides extensive insight into our products and our processes. We’ll be adding to it regularly.

The Sorella FAQs are are good place to visit before placing your Sorella order. But you needn’t stop there. We are always happy to talk personally with you either through email or by phone (800.692.1950).

Visit the Sorella Jewelry FAQs

Palladium. Haven’t heard of it? You will.

When you think of white precious metals, most will think of platinum, white gold, and silver. But you’d be leaving out one of the most versatile and beautiful white metals – Palladium. Palladium is a less well known white  precious metal that is quickly becoming a favorite of both jewelry designers and jewelry customers.

Palladium is a member of the platinum group of metals and is a naturally lustrous white metal. Why then is it so unknown? Up until recently, palladium, due to it’s chemical composition, has been an extremely difficult metal to cast. Jewelers shied away from it. But the rather recent development of 950 Palladium, an alloy of 95% palladium and 5% ruthenium, has made the metal easier to work with, and designers are flocking to this exciting metal.

Why the excitement? Well, Palladium offers a lengthy list of attractive attributes:

• Purity: Like platinum, palladium used in jewelry is 95% pure.
• Color: It’s naturally white and will not fade. It’s color is often described as steel white.
• Lightweight: It’s 40% lighter than platinum.
• Durable: It’s 12% harder than platinum, making it a great metal choice for every-day jewelry such as wedding rings.
• Hypoallergenic:  Like platinum, palladium is non-allergenic, significantly reducing the chance of skin sensitivity
• Affordable:  All of this comes at a significantly lower price than platinum. Palladium is usually priced slightly higher than 14k gold.

The result is a luxury precious metal of high purity in beautiful steel white at a non-luxury price. No wonder jewelry designers love this metal. We sure do.

Sorella offers almost every piece in our collection in palladium and have created a large number of pieces of palladium jewelry. We have extensive experience casting and finishing palladium. We love introducing our customers to this wonderful metal.

To learn more about palladium read our article on the History and Characteristics of Palladium or call or email us to discuss your very own palladium piece.

Photographing Jewelry Can Drive You To Drink

Ask any professional photographer and they’ll all tell you that jewelry is one of the toughest products to photograph. Why? Because metal is highly (and maddeningly) reflective.

What happens is that the jewelry reflects whatever is near by. Place the jewelry on a purple piece of fabric and your silver rings will have purple highlights. Add more light to offset that color and your silver jewelry looks flat and loses all detail and sparkle.

We amateur photographers can definitely improve the quality of our jewelry photos with practice and research, but there is no substitution for the skill and knowledge of a professional product photographer.

At Sorella, we try to shoot a photo of each piece of jewelry that we ship out. (You can see some of our work in our Photos Slide Show.) But we also regularly work with professional commercial photographer, Bob Foran, of Ann Arbor, Michigan to take photos of our collections.

This past week we had an all day shoot with Bob in his studio and he took some fabulous shots of some new pieces (can’t wait to share them with you!) and some of our best sellers.

You’ll be seeing these new products and new photos on our site and in some of your favorite magazines starting late summer. Stay tuned. Sorella is stepping out!

Don’t Let Your Chain Overpower Your Pendant. Please.

We often are asked by customers for suggestions on what necklace chain to choose to go with a pendant they’re ordering. Our answer is always that with personalized pendants you don’t want a busy, overly ornate chain that competes with the pendant.

We may be a bit biased, but we believe … passionately believe … that the pendant is the star of a necklace.

So, our suggestions are always for simple necklace chains that set off the pendant. Our favorites are the silky snake chain, or a light cable or wheat chain. And the best look is to match the metal of the chain to the metal of the pendant.

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