you get what you pay for!

the other day I came across a rather shocking article on NY Mag about a study done by the Ecology Center, which revealed that a lot of costume jewelry for sale at stores such as Forever 21 and Claire's contains dangerous chemicals, including lead and even arsenic. yikes! I never buy jewelry from stores like Forever 21 because of a moral objection (the vast majority of their pieces are copied from higher end brands and as a designer I find it so disheartening), but now I definitely will never purchase anything from these stores because of the presence of really dangerous chemicals. hopefully this study will result in changes of materials used by these stores. definitely an argument for purchasing gemstone jewelry :)