Four times its metal: a Garrard egg makes £123,500

§1A promotional egg sets a jewellery record.

A chocolate company's promotional egg has set an auction record most jewellery houses would take. A 22-carat gold 'Conundrum' egg made by Garrard & Co. of London in 1983 sold for £123,500, about $166,600, at Batemans Auctioneers & Valuers in Stamford, Lincolnshire on 1 August, a result reported by Forbes on 8 August. The house calls it a world auction record for a bejewelled egg of its type. It made close to six times its pre-sale estimate and about eighteen times the £6,500 it fetched the last time it came up. Forbes dates that earlier sale to 2018 and the Batemans catalogue entry for the same lot is dated July 2017; this paper carries both readings rather than picking one.

The number worth holding against it is the metal. The catalogue puts the egg at 323.6 grams of 22-carat gold, which is 91.7% fine, or roughly 296.6 grams of pure gold, 9.54 troy ounces. At the $4,341.30 an ounce this paper's tape has carried since Friday's close, that is about $41,400 of bullion, a figure derived by this desk from the stated weight and fineness rather than published by anyone. The record is four times the metal. The rest is signature and story, and a trade that sets its own making charges should be able to say precisely what each is worth, because that difference is the whole business of a goldsmith.

§2The maker's name against the melt figure.

What the buyer took home is a piece of British advertising history with a hallmark on it. Cadbury's commissioned twelve individually designed 22-carat eggs from Garrard in 1983 for a nationwide treasure hunt, burying Perspex caskets across the country, each holding a clue to one egg; a thirteenth was made in secret. This one, called Cuckoo Cuckoo, is engraved and enamelled in translucent green, blue, orange and white, worked with a cat, a weather vane, stars, mice, a castle and a treasure hunter finding a golden egg. Greg Bateman, managing director at Batemans, called the eggs "a fascinating piece of British cultural history".

§3A desk with almost nothing to price.

The result lands on a desk that has had very little to price. This paper has filed one auction story in the past three editions, Bonhams' three-city Chanel series on 8 August, and made the same point there. The house estimated a Robert Goossens costume bangle made for Chanel around 1960 at $13,000 to $20,000, against Chanel Fine Jewelry earrings from 2024 in 18-carat white gold and diamonds at £2,000 to £3,000. Base metal and paste, correctly attributed, carried roughly five times the estimate of current-production gold and stones. The Garrard egg is the same trade running the other way: real gold, sold on who made it, for whom, and in what year.