Paste is a hard, brilliant glass with a high lead content that is cut and polished to imitate diamonds and other precious stones in jewellery and dress ornaments. In the antiques trade, the term also appears in ceramics, where the paste is the clay body of porcelain, as in soft-paste and hard-paste porcelain, but on its own it usually refers to imitation gemstones.
Paste jewellery flourished in the eighteenth century, when improved lead glass allowed jewellers to produce stones of remarkable sparkle. The Paris jeweller Georges Frédéric Strass was so closely associated with the material that strass became a common term for it in Europe. Stones were individually cut and closely set in silver, often with a coloured or silvered foil behind them to increase brilliance, and the settings were sometimes closed at the back. Popular forms included shoe and knee buckles, brooches, necklaces, earrings and hair ornaments. Collectors value fine Georgian paste for its craftsmanship, and look for well-matched stones, original foils and settings, and absence of clouding, chipping or water damage behind the foil. Later paste and costume jewellery remain widely collected too.
