The Easter egg was a jewel before it was a confection, and for one family it was never anything else. The House of Fabergé, in Saint Petersburg, made eggs for the Russian tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II to give to their wives and mothers at Easter, and it made them for a working lifetime: the imperial series was produced between 1885 and 1917.
50 imperial eggs were made. 44 are known to be in complete or partial physical existence. That survival rate says a good deal about what happened in Russia after 1917, and rather more about what people will carry when they leave.
The first was the Hen Egg, made in 1885. It has a plain outer enamel shell, 65 mm across, with a golden band around the middle, and it opens: inside is a yolk, inside that a hen, and inside the hen a miniature crown. The whole later tradition of the surprise inside the shell comes from that one commission.
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The point for anyone buying at Easter is the shape rather than the provenance. An egg is the rare jewellery form with a reason to exist on a particular morning, and it does not have to be imperial to work. The egg pendant is the wearable descendant, and it is given on the one day of the year when handing somebody an egg needs no explanation at all.
Fabergé was making those pendants in Russia from the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth: small hanging eggs cut from rock crystal, rhodonite, lapis lazuli, nephrite and purpurin, mounted on base metal rather than gold. They were the affordable end of the same idea, and they are the end that has lasted, because nobody had to hide them in a coat lining to get them out of the country.
The house that made them still exists in a fashion. The contemporary pieces come from Fabergé UK Limited, the re-established jewellery house. It maintains a Fabergé Heritage Council to keep the archive honest.
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Two rules for the purchase. Buy an egg that opens; the shape is dull without the second act, and every good example in the imperial series is a container first. And buy enamel over stones if the budget forces a choice, because the enamel is what a Fabergé egg is remembered for and it is the harder thing to do well.
The chocolate one is not a rival. It is simply a different object with the same outline, and it has the advantage of being eaten by the evening.