Artist and jewellery designer Caroline Pham of ORA-C handcrafts all of her pieces in her Montreal studio.Karene-Isabelle Jean-Baptiste
Diamonds may be forever – but the way we bejewel ourselves is ever changing. As new technologies transform the art of jewellery-making, consumers are seeking to know more about their adornments and to play a bigger role in the design process.
Just ask Alan Shuster, co-founder of Couple Co, Canadian purveyors of personalizable engagement rings. Couple exclusively offers lab-grown diamonds, a category of gem that’s experienced rapid growth in the past few years, to the tune of US $14.6-billion globally this year alone – a noteworthy stat considering that back in 2016, that figure was just $700-million.
“People seek us out because we’re exclusively lab-grown,” says Shuster, who started the business with his co-founder to offer a different way to buy an engagement ring, a process that they found to be confusing and opaque.
He says that when the company launched five years ago, about one-third of couples seeking engagement rings would come in together to choose and design their ring. Now, he says around 75 per cent of couples want to be part of the selection and design process.
“In fact, we often see that the female [partner] will come in first, do a bunch of narrowing down, and then come back with the proposer a week later,” he says.
His customers choose a lab-grown diamond because it’s a “better stone” than a traditional mined diamond, says Shuster. (Lab-created gems are created when carbon is subjected to high temperatures and high pressure in a controlled environment, mimicking the natural process but taking weeks rather than eons.)
“It’s traceable, it’s ethical, it’s more environmentally sustainable – and you’re getting a lot more bang for your buck,” he says, underscoring that lab-grown diamonds and those pulled from the earth are atomically and chemically identical and are graded under the same rules and principles.
“People [typically] start their search online at the major retailers – the Tiffanys, the Cartiers,” says Shuster. “Imagine you go in there and the diamond that you like is $27,000. Then you come to us, that same diamond is $7,000 dollars.”
The appeal of slow jewellery
Montreal-based jewellery designer Caroline Pham has also noticed a trend of consumers embracing a bigger role in the creation process. For her customers, waiting for a piece to be crafted just for them isn’t an inconvenience – it’s part of the draw, she says, of a slow-fashion take on the world of accessories.
“People are excited to think about shopping differently,” says Pham, who launched ORA-C in 2015. “They’re rewarding creativity, integrity and local work that’s being done by someone that they may even have met.”
In Pham’s studio, each piece is handcrafted by her and most are created on a made-to-order basis. She notes that a person is more likely to treasure a piece if they’ve spent time contemplating and designing alongside an independent jeweller like her.
“At the end of the day, they’re definitely going to want to keep it because they’ve been part of the process of making it,” says Pham. “There’s a story to tell, versus buying from [a mass market retailer] where you might not want to talk so much about the buying experience.”
ORA-C’s 'Scorpio Rising' golden hoops, which typically take 2-4 weeks for Pham to complete.KARENE-ISABELLE JEAN-BAPTISTE
While she’s known for her experimental, edgy shapes and unusual material choices, Pham creates her jewellery using an ancient method called “lost wax casting,” in which a wax sculpture forms a mould for metal.
“That allows me to play with texture,” she says. “With traditional jewellery, you hide all mistakes to make a perfect ring with a surface that is hyperpolished. I like to keep it rough, keep all my fingerprints. I play with imperfection and the unexpected sight of that.”
Pham says she sees a lot of young jewellery brands tapping into a model of creating custom pieces and operating on a much smaller scale, an ethos that allows them the freedom to try new materials and techniques.
“It’s intersecting that idea of art and jewellery together,” she says. “And for me, going against the grain has always been my thing.”
Deconstructing traditional forms
Hovering somewhere between traditional techniques and brand-new technologies is Vancouver-based jewellery designer Erica Leal.
An artist by training, Leal’s jewellery draws inspiration from older forms of decorative art, like Greek and Roman mosaics. She reinterprets these forms using modern materials like acrylic inlay and techniques like 3-D modelling and printing, then rivets or solders them together in the traditional way.
“I wanted to make something that was new, that was of this time, and that I felt genuinely excited about,” says Vancouver-based Leal. “It morphed into these mosaic pieces with acrylic that have this weird timestamp where you can’t [pinpoint] it exactly.”
Some people see Art Deco influences, other Egyptian motifs, she says, but the durable acrylic inlay is very definitely made for a modern lifestyle. Today’s jewellery-wearer isn’t “just sitting on a throne looking nice. We’re working!”
Lately, Leal’s been deconstructing the form of the traditional diamond solitaire to make something new and unique. “We often have this idea of what a ring can be, and that’s not always the case,” she says.
Lab-created diamonds, antique stones and Australian parti sapphires – which contain more than one colour within the stone – are popular for engagement rings, she says, whether for sustainability reasons or a desire for something unusual.
“I’m open to using any material in terms of gemstone that fits into people’s ethos,” she says. “Everyone is getting married in their own way now, and I find that this translates into their jewellery.”
Like Shuster, Leal finds more couples coming in together to shop for rings, which means they’re often more open to taking design risks. She creates 3-D models of her designs to share with clients before the creation process begins.
“We can tweak it, and it’s just so helpful for communication,” she says. “When [we] finally land on the design, I get so excited to see it come to fruition.”
The Globe and Mail
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