Victorian Yellow Amber bead necklace, all beads of Baltic Sea origin, all handcut in the late 1800s for the English market.

Amber has always been appreciated and in Europe and its environs the main source of this much-loved gemstone, since ancient times, has been the Baltic.  England in the second part of the 1800s consumed huge amounts of it, in all its shades and colours, ranging from translucent honey through to the opaque “butterscotch” of the above Victorian Yellow Amber beads. Much of it has not survived, for Amber is an organic gemstone -fossilized resin- and is not a hard, tough gemstone; it can be chipped and scratched and fractured. Antique Amber in reasonable condition is, simply, now rare.
By the late 1800s the English taste for necklaces of opaque yellow Baltic Amber saw many luscious strands of “butterscotch” Amber produced, few of which have survived intact. Original strands of this material are now exceedingly costly.

The above Victorian Amber bead necklace is not of itself an original Victorian English item, though all the beads are of that period. Nowadays English dealers in these types of Victorian English jewellery gather these yellow Amber beads where they can -usually from broken strands- to create, when possible, necklaces of rare Antique yellow Amber such as the above.