This is where the median sits, and it is the honest answer to what a secondhand carre costs. The eight scarves here run from $375 for Plaza de Toros to $430, and five of them sit at exactly $430, which shows how tightly the category clusters. Grades are excellent and pristine throughout, and on silk that distinction matters more than it does on leather: a scarf either has pulls, snags and watermarking or it does not, and there is no middle state that conditioning can improve. What varies within this band is the design rather than the quality. Les Fetes du Roi Soleil and Les Voitures a Transformation are dense, heavily drawn compositions from the classical Hermes vocabulary, while La Vie Precieuse de la Mediterranee is looser and more pictorial. Check the hand rolled hem in any photograph, because a machine finished edge or a loosened roll is the clearest sign of a scarf that has been laundered badly.

The upper band tops out at $620, so even the most expensive scarf here is less than twice the cheapest. The premium is not buying better silk, since the twill is the same weight across the range. It is buying a design people are actively looking for, and sometimes a colourway that photographs well. Les Nouveaux Amoureux de Paris at $620 is the outlier, a pale monochrome drawing that reads more like a print than a scarf, and that scarcity of style is what carries the price. Les Cles at $450 and Musique Des Dieux at $470 sit near the bottom of the band and are close to indistinguishable in quality from the group below. Four of these eight are graded pristine, which is the strongest argument for paying up: at this price a pristine carre with an intact hem and no pulls is effectively a new scarf at well under retail.

A secondhand Hermes scarf costs about $430, and almost everything above that is paying for a design rather than for condition or quality. That makes this an unusually easy category to shop, because the downside is small and the range is narrow enough that getting the price wrong barely matters. The variable worth caring about is the hem. A hand rolled edge is the construction detail that separates a real carre from a copy and an intact one from a mishandled one, and it is visible in a good photograph if you know to look. Silk also cannot be restored, so grade is closer to a binary than a scale here. If you take one thing away, choose the design you will actually wear rather than the cheapest listing, because the money you save by dropping a band is roughly $50 and the scarf will be on your neck either way.