The Flea Market Fabergé Egg

If I want a comfort television show, I'll often turn to Antiques Roadshow. It's fascinating to see the value of an object that somebody picked up at a flea market or had handed down through generations of a family. Usually it'll just be a few hundred or maybe a few thousand dollars. But every once in a while somebody strikes it big.

That's the storyk behind this article where a flea market trinket turned out to be a Fabergé egg, and not just any Fabergé egg, but a rare one that had been presumed lost. And it was a flea market find that had almost gotten melted down for the value of the metal.

About a decade prior, an American scrap metal dealer was perusing a flea market in the Midwest. On the hunt for metals that he could melt down and sell, he came upon a gold egg and its intricately-designed stand. Upon opening the delicate, little egg, he found a gold clock with diamond-encrusted hands. Thinking he could make at least a few hundred dollars profit by melting down the egg and its stand, and selling it, the man, who has remained completely anonymous, purchased the item for nearly $14,000. 

Despite this rather large investment, he would swiftly learn from potential buyers that the gold was not worth a fraction of what he paid for it. Frustrated, he left the egg perched on his kitchen counter, thinking he had thrown away $14,000 on a bad investment. The all-but-abandoned egg was relegated to a spot in his kitchen for years until one evening in 2012, when he started to wonder. Curiously, he Googled the name on the back of the clock that was inside of the egg: “Vacheron Constantin.” 

I'm not going to give away the value of the egg - you'll have to read the article for that - but it was a lot more than anything I've ever seen on Antiques Roadshow.