Unboxing the World’s Smallest Engagement Ring¿! ¦ Wild Vintage Jewelry Finds & Gold Tooth!
1 Video View·Jun 9, 2025
I think I just found the world's smallest engagement ring.
I am not going to touch this with my hand, but yeah, that's pretty disgusting.
How's it going everyone?
Welcome back to my channel.
I wanted to go through one of these mystery boxes with you guys.
So my jewelry store is always buying scrap gold, scrap platinum, sometimes sterling silver,
and we often times come across some pretty interesting things.
Typically, once a week or so, I'll have my dad put together one of these boxes full of
some of the more interesting things that we've come across, and I like to go through them
piece by piece with you guys and just kind of talk about some of these interesting finds.
So in no particular order, let's start off.
Looks like we have a vintage ring here.
We'll zoom in.
This is looking like a diamond, round diamond.
I'm actually surprised, typically in this style setting, something this old, you would
see like a European cut, but this is a more modern, round, brilliant cut, but a definitely
heavily worn ring.
This is a style of ring that is still popular to this day, just a lot of detail.
This one appears to be somewhat two-tone, so white gold at the top, yellow gold at the
bottom.
You can see it's pretty smashed there at the top, and that could be repaired.
You could put that on a mandrel and straighten that out.
Pretty thin shank at the bottom, but yeah, really pretty ring.
What we'll end up doing with this, and I know this will probably upset a lot of you, but
this diamond will be removed, and then this gold will be sent away to a refinery and melted
down.
But yeah, pretty ring.
Moving on, staying on the ring theme, I did see this one in the box whenever I was getting
set up.
So this is the diamond in the center and blue sapphires on the sides, and something that's,
it goes against design 101, but typically you don't want the smaller stone in the middle
of two larger stones.
Usually the larger stone goes in the center, but this is, you know, no offense to whoever
did this, but kind of a hack job.
So if you can kind of see how this ring's put together, this center setting, someone
kind of shoved a smaller setting into the setting that was originally in the ring.
So this ring would have been set up for three stones that are the size of these blue sapphires,
and this was probably like a sentimental diamond from, you know, someone's mother or something
like that.
So you know, it is a sentimental piece, but that's what's going on here.
And same thing with this ring, this will be torn apart.
Stones will be kept for repair purposes if there's no damage to them, and then the gold
gets sent off.
And just to kind of, I haven't done this in a while, just to kind of show you the process
here, and I'm going to try my best to hold steady under this magnification, but basically
I have these special pliers.
Sometimes it's hard to grab onto these prongs if they've been worn out too far, and I'm
usually doing this under a microscope, so it's a lot easier.
But I can just kind of grab and pull these down.
That diamond one's a little bit harder to grab, let's grab these blue sapphire ones.
So bends back.
Once those prongs are pulled back, I just use a little piece of beeswax that's rolled
up, and it's sticky enough to pull the stone out.
And you can see this ring is pretty gross, still kind of dirty underneath those stones.
Who knows what that is, you see a little bit of everything in the jewelry business.
But a lot of times in my videos people ask, what is that stuff you use to pick up the
gemstones and the diamonds that I'm setting, but the answer is beeswax.
That just kind of shows you how we tear these apart.
But let's put this blue sapphire aside, and it looks like a chain wants to come along
for the ride on this ring, so we'll talk about it.
We often times buy broken chains or necklaces that people no longer wear, and this is a
good example where the pendant is not really designed very well for everyday wear.
So this is a diamond cross, and just by, you know, it sitting in this box, getting moved
around slightly, you can see how this chain is just stuck between all the little diamond
settings that are in it.
This would be a nightmare if you liked wearing sweaters or things like that, that could get
caught on all these little settings, all these prongs, at risk of getting pulled back, losing
stones.
So yeah, not a really good everyday wear cross, but yeah, that chain is all tangled up.
This style chain too, by the way, is, let's see what it is.
It's not exactly what I thought it was, but this is a good sign of a stretched out chain.
See all these links, how they're all closed up and kind of pulled apart?
Those were probably ovals at one point, but this person probably got caught on something
and stretched their chain out.
Moving on, let's see, we got another ring here.
This is an opal with some diamonds around it, white gold, and that one will also get
torn apart, sent to the scrap bin.
Now, pearls, I think I've talked about this before, people will oftentimes come in and
ask me to tell them that their pearls are real or fake, and I won't do this with customer
pearls, but one way to tell if your pearls are real or not is you actually rub them against
your teeth.
And if they feel chalky, that's usually a good sign that they are real.
And if they feel like really glossy and kind of like plastic, they're most likely not real
pearls.
But yeah, just a simple pearl strand and it looks like a gold plated clasp.
Moving on, we'll grab this, a little different.
If you know what this is, drop it down below in the comments.
I'll give you a little time to think about it.
Give you a little hint, it is something you'll never want to need to use.
This is actually a key to a pair of handcuffs.
Probably an older pair of handcuffs, but yeah, kind of neat.
Alright, so I was going to grab this other ring here and I noticed something really disgusting.
And I am not going to touch this with my hand, but this is a human tooth.
And it looks like there's a little bit of a gold cap on there.
But yeah, that's pretty disgusting.
So yeah, the full root and everything.
And how we extract the gold in situations like this is we usually roll the tooth up
in like a paper towel and then we'll go outside on the sidewalk or something and just smash
it up with a hammer.
Just to break it apart from the gold portion.
But yeah, you can see on the right hand side, see how it's kind of flat whenever I rotate
it?
They probably ground their teeth at night.
But yeah, pretty nasty stuff.
So we'll set that one aside.
I think I did a gold bridge in my last scrap video, so it seems like we have a dental theme
going on here.
So this is a synthetic blue stone.
You can tell just by how perfect it looks.
You can tell this ring is pretty well worn.
There's some scratches across the top.
These synthetic stones are pretty tough.
They can take a pretty good beating.
But yeah, white gold ring, that'll get torn apart and then melted.
And then we have a watch.
This is a mechanical watch.
You can tell by the second hand how it's just kind of gliding across.
It's not tick-tocking like a quartz watch would.
So something like this, it gets powered by the movement of the person wearing it.
And this watch is just made out of stainless steel and I don't know, probably from like
the 50s maybe, 50s, 60s.
But yeah, I really like gold watches.
Moving on, we have...
This looks like...
So you can see with this how bright yellow this is.
This appears to be 18 karat gold and there's some little stamps on it.
I could check it under a microscope to be for sure, but yeah, this definitely looks
like 18 karat gold and I believe...
I think that's too small even for like a newborn baby, but yeah, that is possibly the world's
smallest engagement ring.
I should put a little stone in it.
All right, and moving on.
And while I untangle this, I wanted to thank everyone who subscribes to the channel.
I really appreciate it.
If you like these mystery box videos, be sure to like, subscribe to my channel.
Also recently added a membership option to the channel.
I think you just join down below.
There's a little button.
One of you actually already found it.
I think I just added it the other day and Mary Beth Sullivan, I saw you signed up for
a membership early.
Thank you very much for all your support.
I really...
So here we go.
Notorious for picking up fuzz and hairs.
So I've seen these come in and they are just covered in hair, like the whole entire chain.
Recently actually we had someone come in with a chain like this and they were like, I don't
know what it is, but my chain is getting shorter.
And I originally bought it as like a, you know, it was like an 18 inch chain and now
it's like 15 inches or something.
And it was because the whole chain was just covered in their hair.
And as more and more hair would build up, it basically tightened up the links and made
it shorter around her neck.
So that is one thing that I always point out when people are shopping for a chain just
to consider how comfortable it will be depending on what you wear.
As far as like your clothing, like if you wear these like wool sweaters and things like
that that have the fuzzies on it, or if you have longer hair, just things to consider.
But yeah guys, that is everything for this week's box and I appreciate you watching and
we'll see you in the next one.
