SELRO SELINI jewellery

Although the two terms are often used together by vintage jewellery sellers, the jewellery is rarely from both SELRO (which was a company started in the US in the 1940s by Paul Selenger) and SELINI which was another company run by Selenger. Selenger was responsible for the design of Selenger/Selini pieces.

Famous for the ‘Many faces’ of Selro – the jewellery often featured Asian faces and this is what the company is most famous for. Known as Thai girls or Asian princesses.

Much of Selro/Selini jewelry is unsigned and was originally hang-tagged. There are some clues, however, to identifying unmarked Selro/Selini jewelry. Much of what is sold as SELRO/SELINI is not actually produced by them. This is really annoying for vintage jewellery sellers and collectors. Signed pieces are very rare.

There are a lot of bogus claims about Selro jewellery so it is important to be aware of the ways to properly identify them. Kathie Davies has done some incredible research and has developed a website to help people correctly identify Selro jewellery and, more importantly, to identify fakes. We recently received some pieces of jewellery which were described as SELRO but are actually not made by that company. They are still lovely items of jewellery but  at Kikulu we would not sell them with the wrong description as we care very much about our reputation. We list those items as NOT SELRO.

Tips to identifying SELRO jewellery

• Bracelets have 5 separate sections linked together. They are usually 7 and a half or sometimes 8 inches long.
• Bracelets and some of the bib necklaces have a distinctive back bracing – see the images on the bib necklaces listed below.
• They only produced clip on earrings and more rarely some screwbacks – never studs or danglers.
• SELRO did not do Buddhas but they did do fabulous Japanese NOH masks
• Asian princess bracelets with rectangular cabochons are NOT SELRO they used marquise shaped cabochons.
• SELRO confetti lucite bracelets have hidden faces