The beauty of an irregular line

Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939)

By the late nineteenth century, designers across Europe were looking at nature differently.

The Art Nouveau movement brought flowers, leaves, insects and flowing lines into furniture, architecture, glass and jewellery. What interested its designers was the structure of nature as much as its appearance: the way a stem curves, the uneven edge of a leaf, the pattern of a wing.

This changed the way materials were used.

René Lalique, for example, became known for combining enamel, glass, horn and semi-precious stones with forms drawn from the natural world. Émile Gallé brought plants and insects into his glasswork.

Jewellery began to accommodate materials for their colour, texture and surface, rather than treating them simply as settings for precious stones.

René Lalique (1860-1945)

Mother-of-pearl lends itself particularly well to this way of thinking.

The material is formed inside a shell as layers of nacre build over time. Those layers create its characteristic lustre. Depending on the shell and the angle of the light, the surface can appear silver, cream, pink or green. Its edges and markings vary from one piece to another.

For a designer, that variation is part of the material's character.

It is also what makes mother-of-pearl difficult to make completely uniform. Two pieces may have similar shapes and still catch the light differently. A small change in the surface can alter the colour entirely.

We kept those differences in our Mother of Pearls collection.

The Arwen: Mother-of-Pearl Drop Earrings

The pieces are deliberately irregular, allowing the mother-of-pearl to retain some evidence of the shell it came from. The design follows the material closely enough for its natural variation to remain visible.

That seemed right for Arwen.

She is one of our muses who pays attention to detail. She understands that character often comes from the things that cannot be reproduced exactly.

There is a useful lesson in that for jewellery.

A material with its own history does not need much improvement. It needs a good hand, a considered form and enough restraint to let it remain recognisable.

Mother-of-pearl had already spent years forming beneath the sea before it reached us.

We decided to leave some of that history showing.

Annasach