Oxidized silver Marte pendant on baroque pearl with cabochon pink tourmaline

How it is made

The words of the trade, one by one, explained to those who do not know them.

01

Irregular voids

In geometric piercing the error is measured against the module that repeats; here there is no module, and every void has to be decided as it is opened. The risk shifts: not that a mesh comes out crooked, but that at some point the solid metal is left too thin, and the piece gives at exactly that spot. Whoever does it holds together two things that pull in opposite directions, an outline that has to look random and a thickness that has to carry.

02

Oxidizing

The silver is darkened deliberately, and then re-polished only where the light has to come back. The black stays in the voids and the recesses, the pale on the raised work: it is a design made by subtraction, and whoever does it decides where to stop the cloth.

03

Tourmaline

«Tourmaline» is not the name of a stone: it is the name of a family of minerals that share the same structure and change composition — and so color — according to the elements that enter them while the crystal grows. Pink, green, blue, yellow, black, and sometimes two colors in the same crystal. Nor is the color a single one even within the same stone: tourmaline is strongly dichroic, that is, it absorbs light differently along the axis of the crystal and across it, and looked at lengthways it always comes out darker. Whoever cuts it therefore has to decide in advance which way to orient the table, because from the same rough can come a bright pink or a pink that is almost black, and the material removed to put it right does not come back. Whoever mounts it has one more problem: the crystals are run through by fine fractures along their length, and rapid heat opens them. Tourmaline is therefore set into a cold, finished mount, and it does not go under the flame.

04

Cabochon cut

No facets: the stone is roughed out and polished to a continuous dome. It is not the easiest cut, it is the cut that hides least — on a smooth surface every undulation reads with the naked eye, while among facets it is lost. And the light does not come back as sparkle: it goes in, passes through the thickness and comes back up carrying the color with it, so what you look at is the color and not the fire.

05

Baroque pearl

Baroque means that the pearl is not round, and that it has not been made round: the mother-of-pearl settled around a nucleus that had shifted, and every layer repeated the offset of the one before, until the body grew with its own humps and folds. A round one can be discarded and replaced with another of the same size; a baroque cannot, there is no second one with the same outline. Whoever mounts it is therefore working on a unique piece: the seat has to be fitted by hand to that shape, and forcing it chips the mother-of-pearl, which above the nucleus is a few tenths of a millimeter thick.

06

Pearl

The pearl is the only gem produced by a living animal, and it is not a mineral like the others: it is aragonite — calcium carbonate — held together by conchiolin, an organic substance the mollusc lays down between one layer and the next. That organic part is its weak point. On the hardness scale the pearl sits around three: it scratches with a fingernail, and the metal of another piece of jewelry marks it at the first contact. But the scratch is not the worst damage: being a carbonate it dissolves in acids, and sweat, perfume, hairspray and vinegar corrode the surface until the luster goes out. It goes on last, after the perfume, and comes off first; it is cleaned with a barely damp cloth and put away dry, never shut in a bag where no air passes. And you watch the thread or the cord that holds it too: it is the part that ages first, and it should be replaced before it gives, not after.