IWI Imperial World Solid 10K Yellow Gold Oval Champagne CZ Halo Stud Earrings

IWI Imperial World solid 10K yellow gold halo stud earrings with an oval champagne cubic zirconia center, marked 10K with the IWI maker's mark. Each center stone is a warm golden peach, the color the trade calls champagne, running toward orange at the pavilion and lighter across the table. Around it sits a full halo of round CZs in individual prong settings, and the prongs are left standing proud between each stone so the outline of the earring reads as a pointed star rather than a smooth circle. The backs are open, letting light enter beneath both the center and the halo.

The champagne center is the choice that makes these work in yellow gold. A colorless stone in a yellow mount picks up gold from every direction and ends up looking faintly dirty, while a stone already carrying warm color absorbs the gold cast as part of its own hue and reads richer for it. The halo then does the opposite job, ringing all that warmth with bright points that keep the piece from going soft, and the raised prong tips multiply those points by catching light on bare metal between every stone.

Posts with butterfly backs.

Verifications:
Solid 10K gold has been verified using an Auracle Gold Analyzer.

Details:
Maker: Imperial World, IWI
Metal: Solid 10K Yellow Gold
Hallmarks: 10K, IWI
Center Stone: Champagne Cubic Zirconia
Center Stone Cut: Oval
Halo Stones: Cubic Zirconia
Setting: Prong, pointed star outline
Earring Style: Halo Stud
Closure: Post with butterfly backs
Condition: Excellent estate condition

Fun Facts:
The IWI stamp belongs to a company that built a wide house. Imperial World, Inc. registered IWI as a trademark in July 1984 for necklaces, pendants, bracelets, rings, earrings and brooches, and filed it twice more in 1993. Their earliest registration on record is from June 1982, and over the following two decades they accumulated roughly twenty marks spanning gold jewelry, distributorship services and a substantial pearl business under names including World Pacific Jewelry, Pearlustre and The Empress Pearl Collection.
Cubic zirconia was invented behind the Iron Curtain, and not for jewelry. Soviet scientists at the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow perfected the growth process in the mid 1970s while developing optical materials for laser research, and only afterward did anyone notice that the crystals they were producing looked extraordinary when faceted. In Russia the material is still called fianit, after the institute's acronym, rather than cubic zirconia. Every CZ in the world descends from that laboratory.