Handheld XRF and Fashion Fraud
The views and opinions expressed are those of the presenters and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any company. Any content provided should be considered their opinion and are not intended to be interpreted as an endorsement. Today, Maureen Moses, a fine jewelry and watch authentication specialist with fashionfile.com, is joining us to talk about her work with handheld XRF. Fashionfile.com or a fashion file showroom can be visited to buy and sell ultra luxury handbags and accessories. You have any other questions about how Fashionphile works, you can find them at fashionphile.com, f a s h I 0 n p h I l e Com.
Speaker 1:Welcome to our solutions for nanoanalysis podcast brought to you by Bruker Nanoanalytics. We look forward to bringing you a new podcast regularly. My name is Cody Morton. I'm a marketing communications specialist at Bruker Nanoanalytics and an information enthusiast. If you like to learn from specialists in their field and hear what technologies are solving their problems, you will enjoy this podcast.
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Speaker 1:Maureen, thank you for joining us today. What made you interested in science as a kid?
Speaker 2:I was always camping with my family, and so I was always outdoors. And it just made me very interested in the natural world. And, also, the eyewitness books were so good. The rocks and minerals and volcanoes and earthquakes, and so all that stuff really fascinated me. And I ended up pursuing geology for my academic credential.
Speaker 2:I got an undergrad from San Diego State University in geological sciences, and then I went into a master's program at Central Washington University in Ellensburg. And I got a master's of geological sciences there. And throughout that, I had several internships. So I've worked on several different technologies, XRD, LAICPMS, electron microbes, super fun stuff. So I'm really familiar with how to use data and work it in a way where you can actually generate some interpretations from that.
Speaker 2:And, like, the majority of the jobs in the geosciences are gonna be things like protecting groundwater from toxins or mapping hazards so that way you don't build a home somewhere where you could get hurt if you could prevent it. I just happened to end up in rather offbeat jobs, and so I'm now in the fine jewelry worlds where the gemologist.
Speaker 1:I love it. So what did your job at Fashionphile kind of entail? Off the beaten path a little bit, but a day in the life of Maureen at her
Speaker 2:is you need to get a gemologist diploma from the gem Gemological Institute of America. I was looking to move back to San Diego, and it happens to be located here. So that worked out. And that took about six months. It's like a trade degree and you don't necessarily need a college education to go there.
Speaker 2:So it's really exciting, but you absolutely need it to work and find jewelry and watches. In terms of my day, we will we being the people I work with and my fellow authenticators, we will take jewelry, and we will assess whether it or not it's authentic and at the quality that it could be resold to a new home, essentially. And, basically, we will look at returns. In the gem and jewelry industry, there's always someone trying to do a bait and switch, so we happen. And then we will look at all of our new assess what the metal alloy is.
Speaker 2:And then at we will sit down with each piece and a microscope, and we will look at it at magnification, and we'll study things like the craftsmanship as well as the stones that are utilized to make sure that they are what they say they are, but also that they're not broken or something like glass. So it it's a pretty fun job, and it's definitely we probably look at about 30 to 40 pieces of jewelry a day per authenticator.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So that keeps you busy very much. So if you weren't doing this job, what would be your, like, dream job, your ideal job?
Speaker 2:I think even looking back, I always wanted to be, like, a volcanologist for the US geological survey. But I also like the cool part about the internships that I had taught me that, like, those kinds of research experiences were maybe not the best match because I really like working with people, and I found spending a ton of time in the lab to be rather isolating. I also really thought I was gonna be a high school science teacher, and then COVID hit. And I was probably halfway through a credential here in California. And the cool part is I still get to apply that as we train and onboard new employees and get them up to speed.
Speaker 2:And then, also, it's just a really cool job I found myself in, and so I'm gonna camp out here for a while. I really enjoy it. Also, they gave me an XRF. That was actually, like when I interviewed, and they're they just casually were like, oh, and this is an XRF. And I was like, oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:That's so cool. It's like the dream of every geoscientist is to have an XRF. And when I was talking to the staff who were there at the time, like, there was no recording of metadata, no, I get, like, review of the output and comparing the different values to each other. And so I saw a really exciting opportunity to apply what I'm using for my job to what I'm using for or what I used in my research experience.
Speaker 1:That's excellent. I'm sure they didn't even realize how much more helpful it could be to have all of those datasets and things collected and able to call upon.
Speaker 2:Well and it's I think part of it is you have to be scrappy in your career sometimes and take the path less the less traveled path. And I got a lot of pushback from some of my colleagues who are really questioning what I was doing with my career. And and then also since I've been here, being able to communicate the results and the fact that I'm putting some of my time into this kind level of analysis and qualifying why it will help us be better authenticators and produce better product for our clients, and it can reassure them. And just having to wear a lot of different hats, it's the cool part is it's a start up, and so there's definitely a lot of, I think, there's muster for it. People are interested in seeing what it can take them, and that what we're learning is really cool.
Speaker 1:Excellent. Now because we call our podcast solutions for nanoanalysis, I challenge all of our interviewees to come up with a problem that we're solving. So what is the problem that you're solving right now?
Speaker 2:The problem I solve and my peers solve is that we are looking to root out inauthentic pieces from the supply chain that we work with. We have people submit their product to us, and it comes to our desks. And we are the people who are the first line of defense in protecting our consumer. And so what we're doing is we're using our XRF as a first line of defense because it's such a powerful tool. And there's and it's an important part of, like, human history.
Speaker 2:Like, as long as people have worn jewelry or found a shiny stone, someone somewhere wanted it. And so a lot of people will try to duplicate it. Or because these are branded jewelry from companies like harper or Cartier and Tiffany and Company and Van Cleef and Arpel, there's a premium you pay to buy from those companies. And some people think that they can make it on the cheap. And on one level, the XRF can help us find the easy fakes that are made out of base metals, what we call it, so things that are iron and nickel.
Speaker 2:If you ever saw a cartoon where the guy bends coin in his teeth, it's the same idea. And then the second order is that we have found that there are some discrepancies in the alloys for pieces that are counterfeit that are made out of gold and diamonds, which is actually a lot of what we see. The majority of our inauthentic pieces are made out of real gold, real diamond. They just use a different set of ingredients than we would expect.
Speaker 1:Gotcha. So you're seeing percentages that don't match up what they should be if they were authentic?
Speaker 2:Pretty much. And, that's really helpful to us. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I bet. So the history behind the problem makes a lot of sense. When you were describing the coin, it made me think of some history shows that I watch and their archaeology shows, and they're finding Roman coins. And then they're, oh, but it's not a real Roman coin. It's a fake Roman coin from the first century.
Speaker 1:And they they talk about even way back in the first century, people were trying to get away with selling false goods. It's very amazing that that problem has been so long.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a tale of all this time. And then I, like, always joke with people. If people put as much energy into solving global problems as they do making counterfeit pieces because there's someone spending a lot of time doing this stuff and putting a lot of energy and thought into this. Like, it's just it's we would be in a different society.
Speaker 2:Like, it's really I commend them for their fortitude and their stick with this because they are keeping me on my toes.
Speaker 1:They're still scoundrels, though. Oh my goodness. How people approach the problem before XRF technology was available?
Speaker 2:So, historically, it was a wet test. And, basically, they called it a scratch test, and you would scratch a piece of jewelry. So it's destructive. It's not super noticeable though when you see it done in person, and you'd scratch it. And you would do several different scratches for the strength of acid that you're testing.
Speaker 2:And as the strength of the acid increases, you'll dissolve up to a certain carat weight of gold. And this was important because, like, countries like France have been regulating the, you know, sale of fine metals since, like, the seventeen hundreds. So it's there's a historical precedent for it. And, basically, just whatever one didn't dissolve that sort of gave you your carat weight. We can also use, like, density, but there's a lot of variability in the craftsmanship and the design process.
Speaker 2:Definitely, XRF is very efficient, very it's great because it's nondestructive because we're able to return products that we decide not to buy from our suppliers to their back to them in the same quality that we sent them in or they sent them in.
Speaker 1:I had you look at the questions ahead of time, and you mentioned in some of the notes that you had written was that you found that sometimes the size of the jewelry has affected the readout. Can you give more information about that?
Speaker 2:That was really cool. One of our brands uses a particularly unique alloy, and I knew what that alloy should be based on something like the size of a bracelet or maybe a really thick ring, so, like, maybe a half an inch, three quarters of an inch wide. And when they have, like, little mini like, tiny rings. So, like, popular styles right now is that you stack a whole bunch of little tiny rings together. Somehow it was missing the readout of a couple of the small lower abundant abundance elements that we knew were in there.
Speaker 2:And when you check spectrum, it was there. But using the abundance readout is actually a lot easier in terms of communicating to the team members who are nonscientists or not working directly with this data every day. And so I partnered with our representative from Bruker, and he worked with dev team there. And, basically, they created a patch specifically for this piece or, like, when the pieces are small using this alloy, it reads it out now. So that's really cool.
Speaker 2:And it was it saved us a lot of time, and it has given us the ability to be consistent in what we present to our peers. And it gave us another layer because if you don't know how to read the spectrum, it can appear like a red flag. And I think everybody who's using the XRF in the lab is absolutely capable of reading the spectrum. They know how to access it in the instrument tools to, like, my manager or something who's not as familiar. If I add a spectrum readout to the notes, it might be really confusing and lots of lots of interesting stuff.
Speaker 2:It was really I was really grateful that they were able to correct that for us. I didn't even know that was a possibility.
Speaker 1:Excellent. Glad to hear they were able to come up with some sort of solution for you.
Speaker 2:I was so excited.
Speaker 1:You had mentioned the scratch test is destructive, and the XRF is nondestructive. How else has that been helpful with having a nondestructive way to test your pieces?
Speaker 2:In the gem and jewelry world, like, weight is everything. Like, weight of a diamond, carat, c a r a t. Weight of gold, k a r a t. Like, weight is historically how everything has been done. And if you're losing weight on some of your analyses that there are people who would argue that affects the value even if you it gives you the opportunity to better qualify your claims.
Speaker 2:So I think that's, like the cool part about using the XRF is that we're able to preserve it just as is. And then there's nobody wants their piece altered if we decide not to proceed buying a piece either because usually it's something like it's broken or we find a crack stone, not because it's inauthentic. And even if it is, that's not necessarily the supplier's fault. You don't know how they got it, And we still wanna make sure we're returning it to them in the exact same condition that they sent it to sent it to us in, but also that we're not, you know, removing so much not that it would really count, but it adds up over time. You know, like, a bench jeweler can calculate how much gold they should have in their sort of production to figure out, like, how much they can sell back and, like, to quality control their work.
Speaker 2:It's really fascinating. It's super in the weeds for me, and I was really surprised to learn it. And then the other thing is time. It takes us fifteen seconds to do a readout. And the fact you know, and then they always say in this industry, time is money.
Speaker 2:And so the fact that we can bang out usually about 30 readouts a day or maybe 60. Worst case scenario, like, we'll have a hundred or something in a day because we have a pile up of product. And the fact that we can do that same day means that we can start paying out our suppliers same day as well.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Now you mentioned in our little back and forth notes that the benefit of having a college degree in this relevant field has been very helpful. How so do you think that?
Speaker 2:I don't think anybody in our team or I don't know necessarily. The jewelry industry is pretty flat. You don't need to have a college degree. And what I've encountered with my friends is that, a lot of them are business degrees, and that makes sense. I would be horrific at running a business.
Speaker 2:I'll just say that, like, flat out. But I came in, and think it was a little confusing. I was lucky to have a pair of managers who let me have my crazy vision. But I it's like, what it produces for us are proprietary resources that allow us to see how these brands have changed their chemistry over time. And the way you do that is not just by looking at readouts next to each other.
Speaker 2:You do them by plotting them on different charts or hearing doing, like, a temporal comparison where you're looking at it over time or where you're looking at it by manufacturer, not just brand. Because sometimes the manufacturers overlap. So that's really cool. And then delivering that in a way that is meaningful to everybody on the team regardless of their background. Thankfully, prior to working in the gem and jewelry industry, I was doing science communication.
Speaker 2:And so it really is it was really guiding how I'm gonna present this to my peers because you can shout it from the mountaintops that you found something, but if you haven't actually like, if you don't deliver it to them in a meaningful way, like, it's a lost cause and you wasted a lot of company time. And it we're already collecting the data. That was my point. I'm like, listen. We're already collecting each piece of data.
Speaker 2:We're already scanning everything. It's I felt like it was being driven, like, driving a jalopy versus, like, a really nice sports car. I saw a sports car and everyone saw a jalopy. I was like, let's flex this device. Like, you guys paid good money for it, and it can tell us a lot more.
Speaker 2:And I was telling them that right now, when I started, we were comparing apples to, like, a basket of fruit. We knew certain things. But when you, like, quantify your data and actually graph it out, all of a sudden, we're comparing apples to apples and, like, apples from one orchard versus apples from another orchard. And that's really helpful and I think really unique in our industry.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you used an interesting note in your, what you had written was that something like XRF might look like magic and trying to connect people that may only have had high school chemistry a million years ago, trying to get them to understand XRF. How do can you briefly tell us how that conversation usually goes?
Speaker 2:Yes. So I am part of my coworker and I will do onboarding for, here in headquarters. We'll do onboarding for new hires. And Oh, and sometimes it comes up. Like, people will say, how do you know?
Speaker 2:Because people always even if sometimes we're qualifying authenticity on something that you can't see. And, usually, especially in onboarding, I wanna introduce them to the idea that it's not magic. If you remember back to high school chemistry, and usually there's a little bit of a groan or a little bit of, oh, I wasn't good at that. I'm like, all you need to do is just remember somewhere someone presented to you the model of an atom. Or maybe you've heard the phrase, like, quanta or quantum mechanics or something.
Speaker 2:You're just like buzzwords. And and when we do talk about it, you always talk about it as it's doing a reading so they can especially a reading on the the spectrum because that's basically it's a spectrum, but it's also a little bit, like, And it's because for the first thing we actually had talk about is that you're not being exposed to X rays by being in this room. That was, like, the absolute first thing we had to talk about. People were like, I'm not going in there X rays. And so we would talk about how it's only when the red lights are flashing that it's running.
Speaker 2:And because it's covered, you're protected. Because we're standing a few feet back, we're protected by air. And then after that, we would talk about exciting the electrons in the electron shell. And as those electrons fall back into the where they're comfortable, that releases an energy amount, and that's what it's reading. And I think I don't know.
Speaker 2:I think sometimes people are just like, it sounds crazy enough. Like, whatever it takes to, you know, get out of this conversation. But, also, like, you wanna be mindful because, like, the reason they hire gemologists at companies like this is that these are federally regulated aspects of the industry. Like, we have to be very thorough in what we say. And I know that sometime heaven forbid, but sometimes these things can end up in court.
Speaker 2:And you wanna make sure that you're you've got your ducks in a row and you're able to talk about why you made a call that you did. And and so that's been really helpful just to have the background understanding. First, because you're able to create the dataset, and second, because you're able to explain to people and reassure them that this is you know, we're confident in our claim of authenticity even if they can't see it with their eyes. Now that's always it's a challenge for everybody.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you talked about comparing apples to apples, and we talked about gems. But do you get a chance to use the XRF on any other non jewelry type of items?
Speaker 2:Yes. Ultra luxury, which is Fashionphile main market, is where you find things like Hermes Birkin bags or Hermes Kelly is another style way that people like. And in the very, very high end ones, you'll see the hardware for these handbags are made out of 18 karat gold and diamonds. And so we will definitely XRF that to ensure that it is what it says it is. And then we actually also still have to look at the diamonds to make sure that they're the quality we would expect from these companies, and it's definitely a trip.
Speaker 2:And even then, even if they're not actually made out of 18 karat gold, they will be sometimes they are they have a plating of 18 karat gold. So we'll also double check for that.
Speaker 1:Sure. And it's important to be able to find that where it's supposed to be to authenticate the piece so that what you've got is actually a genuine piece.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And there's a lot of the gem and jewelry industry is still grounded in human craftsmanship. Like, there are machining techniques that you can use to do components, but there are also a lot of elements that a human artisan is still working directly on these pieces or designing these pieces. And that to me is really cool, like, to have the science interact ultimately with the art even in the past tense. And you can see, like, every once in a while, like, you know, when I first started, we would I would be talking with someone who's training me, and it's you could see someone learning the ropes every once in a while.
Speaker 2:And it was just really fascinating to experience that.
Speaker 1:You talk about your fellow colleagues at Fashionphile. And in your notes, you had mentioned that you're like the avengers of used jewelry. How are the your colleagues using their skills to find fashion?
Speaker 2:It is so cool. We all bring something super unique to the table. One of my colleagues is basically, she's really adept at using, like, the way back machine or going through patents, and you can find, basically, first first order sources about what the piece was be piece was and, like, how it was listed with the carat weight. We measure diamonds at our set. We count them.
Speaker 2:We measure them, but it's always easier to have a hard reference to compare it to. It doesn't always happen, but it's nice when it does. And she has taught us a lot about utilizing those resources. I'm gonna talk about my coworker who's next to me. Sorry, Angel.
Speaker 2:But he came from the pawn industry, and I've never seen someone he always had to QC one of their jewelers, and he got really adept at finding, like, cubic zirconias or CZs and, like, a sea of pave diamonds. I've never seen anything like it. I am totally blown away. I am learning from him how to do these kinds of things. And they took a chance on me, and I was like, I can do big data analysis.
Speaker 2:It's not nearly as sexy, but I'm excited. I was again, it's like a company invests in an XRF. It's not, like, an inexpensive tool. And so I feel like it's satisfying to see that they're getting their money's worth out of their investment.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's excellent. What kind of advancements are on the horizon that will make things even better than we have there?
Speaker 2:As a geoscientist, I'm always I always am creating easier to access trace element data. I think trace element data will probably tell us a lot or more. It could also just be, like, mixing lines for people who are familiar with it, but I would just be curious to go a little bit deeper. And I go as deep as we can given the context that it's still we're an industry, and so it's, like, academic ish. The way I got to study our XRF data was to make the case that we're already collecting it.
Speaker 2:We should sit down and study it too when I'm done with all of my work that I need to get done for the day. And I think sometimes when I was working on previous jobs, people who come from an academic background really want to, like, know all the answers and understand everything and turn over every leaf. And sometimes it's just not possible. You have to move forward. Like, we still have quota, and so we just have a running list of things that we wanna understand better.
Speaker 2:And as we check one thing off the list, we start on the next project. And when just to again, like, it's we're already doing pretty well in terms of authenticity. It's just, like, how can we reinforce our claims with more information and more better training guides, especially because we're in direct competition with some of these brands, and they're not gonna help us. And there's no peer reviewed literature on this kind of stuff. So it's you really just build it out from the ground up.
Speaker 1:What would you recommend that a listener do for more information? Since there's not peer reviewed journals to mention, what would you recommend?
Speaker 2:There's some like, you I look antithetically to what we're doing. Academics will study things like ancient coins, like we talked about earlier, and to see their methods and apply them to what I'm doing here within reason. Obviously, there's you could have even more even more devices and whatever. But what can I do with the tools that I have today is usually the question I'm asking myself? And material science is another one that I look into, understanding gold.
Speaker 2:I also work really closely with our bench ruler who has his degree in metalsmithing. And so he has a very different perspective than I do, and we'll do, like, a Ted at Ted and just, like, chat and go through a piece and really dissect it. And it's really fascinating getting his perspective as well. And then because especially in, like, an industry like the jewelry industry, it's very private. There's not there's also a lot of people who have a belief in how things are, and and that there's nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 2:It's protected them in the past. I'm very into also incorporating the science to qualify those claims. Being a scientist and going through all the programs that I've done is I if the data doesn't support it, I don't if I'm gonna be skeptical of a claim that I should just trust this one thing. And so at least internally, we're starting to have more information. I have no idea what the competition's doing and nor do I think I will find out.
Speaker 2:But it's you do what you can.
Speaker 1:Sure. It's interesting. I've done other podcast interviews with people in other f scientists in other industries, and everybody's industry has that little bit of secrecy that we can't release. The trick is to get the information that's releasable and allow everybody to learn from it. And I think that's the challenge.
Speaker 2:We want our clients to know that we're using an XRF and not a scratch test. We want them to trust that there are people who are making these decisions, and it's an informed decision, and it's not biased. Someone it's we can point to the to the thing that says we may not be able to share it, but I can point share with my manager who definitely comes back to me if there's something that a client disagrees with, and I can walk her through why we said what we said or support my coworker when they make the claim as well. And when we're all on the same page. And that's, like, really important.
Speaker 2:And I trust my teammates, and I think we all like I said, we all bring something to the table. We get the when we get the weird pieces, we are able to sit down and all bring our something to the table and talk about it.
Speaker 1:Are there any weird pieces that you're allowed to talk about, or are those the ones that usually get sent back or we don't talk about that one.
Speaker 2:Those are generally the ones that are the hardest. It's there's not really much to say because it's, like, super in the weeds. Like, it's really granular. And
Speaker 1:The reason it's weird is because it's specifically weird in its own weird way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a completely case by case.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It would be, like, trying to explain an elephant to a blind person. How do you
Speaker 2:explain it? Mom tries to explain tax law to me, it's well, she knows what she's talking about. I do not. Bless her heart. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Too funny. Maureen, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you to our speakers today. If you would like more information about today's topic or to submit a topic idea, please email info.bna@Bruker.com. You can also check out more information in today's show notes.
Speaker 1:Join us next time as we look at a new solution with more scientists and technicians in all sorts of industries.