6.9 x 3.5 x 0.4 cm, 0.21 oz each
10.635 ct Tension Set Rose Cut Tourmalines, Argentium Sterling Silver, Stainless Steel, Niobium Ear Wires
I’d created a prototype version of these lightweight earrings in the past and they’ve been swimming around in the back of my mind. The 10.01 carats of rose cut tourmalines were removed from the prototype pair and can now freely swing from ears. This new pair is similar with 10.635 carats of rose cut tourmalines. The ear wires are hypoallergenic niobium. Argentium is a low tarnish sterling silver alloy.
The name of the design is taken from its inspiration: a radiolarian in the 1862 publication of microscopic sea creatures by Ernst Haeckel, appropriately titled “Art Forms in Nature’. To accommodate stones, I modified the creature as I redrew the Collosphaera Huxleyii Müller, digitized the drawing, modified it again in CAD and sent the file to a laser cutter to be cut in 30 gauge Argentium sterling silver. The texturing and hand finishing includes burnishing each ‘setting’ location by hand on both sides of the metal section to increase the light bouncing through the stones.
The earrings were one of the pairs feature in the Rio Grande Summer Earring Challenge of 2023
