A Twinkle in Her Eye

Classic Facets antique jewelry shop on Pearl St. Mall, Boulder

By Mary Jarrett

"When I’m in the Miss America contest, my talent is going to be I know how to wear jewelry,” Mikki Rainey says, her hands sparkling with diamonds as she shows a shopper how to combine two vintage necklaces for effect. She says it in a devilish way, since she’s well past her pageant days. But Rainey’s knack with jewelry has propelled her on an upward path from used-clothing dealer to “cameo queen” of her Pearl Street domain, Classic Facets.

For a few years, the journey was bumpy. Rainey bought her first business in 1985—BG Raggs, a consignment-clothing shop on Walnut Street between Ninth and 11th that needed jazzing up. She had gotten to know the store by consigning clothes there, and in her opinion, the previous owner was “so ultra-conservative that she thought wearing a white blouse was making too much of a statement.” Rainey had a hunch that styles were about to take off in a very different direction.

“So I called my mother in upstate New York and said, ‘Ma, go to some garage sales and get me some rhinestones,’” Rainey recalls. “People thought I was making a huge mistake, but it was the ’80s—padded shoulders, big hair, glitz!” Customers bought the rhinestones and brought in their own costume jewelry to consign, and within two years Rainey sold BG Raggs and opened Classic Facets, selling all-vintage costume jewelry in her shop on Walnut Street, while the Daily Camera building was being built. Business, slow on Walnut Street, perked up when Rainey moved a block or two north to 10th Street. “It was like night and day, going from Walnut to 10th Street,” she says. “Consignors said, “Now we’re going to bring you real jewelry,” and they did.

Exeunt Rhinestones

A disastrous theft from the shop nearly put Rainey out of business in the late ’80s, “but then I had a miracle,” she says. “Florence Bear—she was a Boulder institution—came in with a whole box of fine jewelry and gave it to me. She said, ‘We can’t afford to lose you.’” Bear put Rainey on the map, calling other dealers to tell them about her. The shop “made an immediate leap into fine jewelry—you weren’t dealing with Mikki’s rhinestones anymore,” Rainey says. “The sudden change made us grow up.” As an investment in the business, she hired a gemologist to train her and her employees. She gained confidence and delight in turning each piece over in her hand like a detective, looking for its level of detail as she considered whether to accept it for consignment.

More than a magnifying loupe, she relies on her own “Oooh, pretty” reaction, she says. One of her favorite items in the shop is a $42,000 necklace from the 1920s with nearly 20 carats’ worth of graduated diamonds. She also likes a European pin depicting St. Cecilia, the patron of music, in red enamel, diamonds and gold.

“The key phrase for this store is ‘attention to detail,’” Rainey says. “Every morning when I’m setting up, I see some detail I haven’t seen before. Each ring, for example, was made for a particular stone; you just can’t plop any old diamond into any old setting. Somebody took the time to create a work of art for one stone.”

She turns to one of dozens of cases of Victorian jewelry, the specialty of Classic Facets. “I’m a drama major—can you tell?” she jokes—“and I’m interested in history, costume, how people wore this stuff. It wasn’t until the 1870s that middle-class people could have jewelry, and to those wacky Victorians, every single thing had meaning,” including colors, stones, flowers, and letters of the alphabet. Among the examples she points out are the mourning or friendship brooches and lockets filled with braided hair; the crescent-and-flower pins that were “morning-after” gifts to brides on their honeymoons; and the transliterated Hebrew letters MIZPAH, which stood for “May the Lord watch between thee and me while we are apart.” Almost as cryptic is the suffragette jewelry that used green (G), white (W) and violet (V)-colored stones—in that order—to telegraph the message “Give Women the Vote.”

Fish and Ships

These days, costume jewelry has dwindled to a sideline at Rainey’s shop. But if there aren’t too many customers to wait on, and if you remember that the store “isn’t a museum” for endless browsing, “and if you ask us real nicely,” she says, “we’ll let you get into our drawers.” She’s talking about the tall bank of 74 drawers at the back of the store, where bracelets, pins, earrings and necklaces are subdivided by color and shape. The labeling system is quirky: HORSES AND ELEPHANTS lie down together in one drawer. WATER DWELLERS houses penguins and fish, but also ships. The BAKELITE drawer is a catch-all. Don’t expect garage-sale prices; these baubles range from about $40 to $1,000, depending on their designer.

Like other antiques dealers, Rainey faces a naturally diminishing supply of the charming old objects she sells. The Internet has had a huge effect on the business, she says, by allowing manufacturers in China and India to peruse auction-house catalogues online and mass-produce knockoffs of the jewelry. On the flip side, the ease of the Internet has connected her with consignors and collectors in 36 states and nine countries.

Lucky us—we can go right to the shop to revel in the sweet, the splashy and the one-of-a-kind, to learn about the past, and maybe go home with a sparkly piece of it.

Classic Facets, 942 Pearl St., is open Tues-Sat 10am-5:30pm and Sun noon-5pm. 303-938-8851; www.classicfacets.com .