Charm bracelets are all grown-up. Traditionally sources of comfort and good luck, the sentimentality interwoven into their design has long made them a popular coming-of-age marker, their familiar clunk forever synonymous with adolescence. In a pandemic-stricken world their popularity is again on the rise, although today’s pieces have been elegantly rethought by a host of jewellers.
Jeweller Annoushka Ducas is putting her own bespoke spin on the trend with My Life in Seven Charms, which offers the opportunity to work alongside the jeweller to create a unique charm bracelet of your own. A biography told in seven charms, Annoushka has got the ball rolling with her own piece. A peapod, symbolising her four children, cradles four freshwater pearls in their diamond and tsavorite pod, while her beloved French bulldogs are nodded to in a blackened gold paw print. Sex on Legs is a tribute to her husband John, who comes complete with his favourite brogues, and a dazzling yellow submarine recalls the first song she danced to with her late mother. An articulated gold fish skeleton marks the piece which signalled the beginning of her jewellery career, while her love of travel is represented in a ruby-set gondola and a spinning globe.
Annoushka recommends attaching the pieces in size order, sticking to either flat or 3D shapes and creating balance with an odd number, which should work like a charm in avoiding that indelicate clunking. §
