Marie Antoinette apparently wore a lot of jewelry. When you jump ahead to our century, you see that gold has hardly lost its popularity among celebrities. A few decades ago, Mr. T of The Mod Squad wore huge gold necklaces and medals.

Although you might think that the current cancellation of big-scale social events like the Met Gala have driven celebrities indoors, current new stories reveal that today’s A-List celebrities are still wearing a lot of gold jewelry when they go out and about, even just to buy a bag of bagels on the weekend.

Crooks aren’t nice people, they hurt people, and we don’t like to write about them. But the fact remains that if we look at crime trends around the country, they can teach us some lessons about the value of precious metals. Also, because crooks make money by selling what they have stolen, their crimes tell us there is a market for the metals they are selling.

Bling has been around for centuries. Marie Antoinette, members of the Russian Imperial family and all kinds of royals from past ages have loved to adorn themselves with shiny, oversized pieces of jewelry. They were apparently trying to send a message that said, “I can afford this stuff, you can’t, I am richer than you are, and you better be impressed.”

We’re going to crawl out on a limb today and state our opinion that karat gold jewelry scrap is probably the biggest and best source of recyclable gold. Why do we think that? Because you don’t have to go panning in the Yukon to find jewelry scrap or (in most cases) hike around fields with a metal detector. Karat jewelry gold scrap is a lot easier to find than that, as the following stories illustrate.