After trekking through my own past and wondering just what legacy I am leaving to my girls an invitation to learning more about Cameo’s hit home!

Mee and the PKIA crew jumped at a chance to attend a lecture at the downtown public library last week. The lecturer was Diana Jarrett (or, as I like to call her, Lady Gem), a graduate of the Gemological Institute of America. Lena and I were pretty excited. I’d always found Cameo’s intriguing, but never knew much about them – only that they are passed through time, telling a story of the profile carved on them.

True dat’, Cameos tell a tale, but for how long they’ve been telling tales is amazing – all the way back to Egyptian times, according to Anna Miller the author of the Cameo book (Lady Gem wrote the revision). The book says that “as far back as 15,000 BC, petroglyphs – figures carved into rock – were used to record significant events and communicate information. In ancient times people used cameos to depict an ethic or moral, or to make a statement about their faith or loyalties.”

Lady Gem was rocking. She also cleared up another myth that I had running through my mind, which was that Cameos were only for women. NOPE – not true – they were originally masculine and used on cloaks, capes, helmets or placed in rings to be used as seals or stamps for important documentation. Women didn’t bring them in to fashion until the Victorian age, when they became a sign of wealth and affluence.

Lady Gem also showed us some modern day cameos and my favorite was made by a carver in Istanbul, Turkey named Sevan Bicacki. He is only in his thirties and has a HUGE European following, I have been visualizing taking MEE TV on the road to check out the bizarre where he works… Hmmm.

The super good news was finding Lady Gem! She has now joined Princess Know It All as a contributing editor. What does this mean? That she can answer just about any and every question you all come up with regarding Jewelry!

Check out Sevan’s work at this link! Also, check out Lady Gem’s (Diana Jarrett) book and her site.