What exactly is a vintage charm?
Loosely speaking, it’s anything that’s neither new nor antique, but somewhere in between. An antique charm is generally accepted to be about a hundred years old at minimum, or to date at least to before the end of World War I, and I think it’s an important distinction to maintain; I shudder when I see charms from the forties described as antique. I’ve also seen charms that are five years old described as vintage, which is pushing it: what they are is used. Call them estate charms if you like, but calling them vintage is deceptive. Many wonderful vintage charms are not in fact that old; some of the best English charms, for example, were made in the sixties and seventies, even into the eighties. They may not be very old, but they’re definitely vintage—they’ve been dangling around on bracelets for at least a couple of decades, developing patina. There’s also what’s known as new old stock—a charm that’s genuinely old but has never been used, hidden away in a jeweler’s back room or the like
