Marte pendant in oxidized silver with white baroque pearl and oval sapphire

How it is made

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

01

Baroque pearl

Baroque means the pearl is not round, and that it was not made round: the nacre was laid down around a nucleus that had shifted, and every layer repeated the offset of the one before, until the body grew with its own bumps and folds. A round one can be discarded and replaced with another of the same size; a baroque one cannot, there is no second one with the same profile. 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 nacre, which over the nucleus is a few tenths of a millimeter thick.

02

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 its surface until the luster dies. 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 the air does not pass. And you look at the thread or the cord that holds it too: it is the part that ages first, and it should be replaced before it gives way, not after.

03

Sapphire

Sapphire is corundum, the same mineral species as ruby: all that changes is the impurity locked in the lattice, and in the blue it is iron and titanium together — neither of the two, on its own, makes the color. On hardness it sits at the ninth degree, immediately below diamond, and it does not fear scratching: it is the reason it holds up on a piece worn every day. The color, though, is rarely the one the stone had when it came out of the ground: most sapphires on the market are heated to open up the blue, and it is a stable treatment accepted everywhere. «Natural» says that the stone grew in rock and not in a laboratory furnace; it does not say that nothing was done to it, and the two things should not be confused.

04

Irregular voids

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

05

Oxidizing

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