For Issue 16 of Something About Rocks, Rachael Taylor spoke to contemporary jewellers to discover how they create their desired pieces in a time of record gold prices. Read all about it below.
There has been much hand wringing in the jewellery world of late as the price of gold has soared to unprecedented levels. A little context for anyone who hasn’t been following along: had you bought a pair of gold hoops last year and – alas! – lost them, it would likely cost you twice as much to replace them this year.
With the price of gold not far off doubling in a year, it has caused many of us to reconsider what were already considered purchases. It has also caused jewellers to evaluate how they use this much-loved precious metal.
Some have pushed on regardless and discovered that there is a strata of collectors for whom spiking prices are actually a turn on, leading to increased sales of chunky rings and heavy chains.
The psychology behind this seems to be that when you can see gold’s stock rising (quite literally – there have been record levels of investment gold purchased in the past year), it is a reminder that a piece of precious jewellery is not just a pretty adornment, but a savvy investment for the future.
As such, it makes us value – and, therefore, justify – these purchases more.
For other jewellers, however, the new price of gold has been a real problem as it impacts what they must charge. As such, they face a choice: make changes, or alienate fans who can now no longer afford their work.
Most are getting agile, and what started as ‘a problem’ has actually opened the door to a whole new era of creativity as designers get experimental – and playful. Marla Aaron’s use of colourful rubber to recreate her cult-classic (usually) gold Heartlocks is a case in point, with the collection launching at Liberty this spring with a price tag of £90.
What is the impact of the price of gold?
For Scottish jewellery designer Ebba Goring, the new price of gold was particularly jarring after returning to jewellery making in 2025 following a six-year break from the bench.
“It has tripled in price [in that time],” she says of gold. “I was thinking that initially I would rerelease some of my classic pieces that I had done before, but I had to completely reprice them, and it was quite a shock.”
Instead, she embarked on something new, developing her colourful Regency collection of earrings. For these designs, Goring wrapped amethysts, blue topaz, rock crystal, garnet and iolite in silver loops cast from stitched-cotton designs, creating designs reminiscent of the girandole earrings popular during the era the collection is named after.
The silver was then plated with nano ceramic coatings to match the exact shades of the gems. To keep it luxe, Goring stuck to 18-carat gold for the posts. “Making the coloured Regency pieces gave me confidence to be more experimental,” says Goring, who is now working on some future projects that involve research and development of non-precious metals.
What other precious metals are in the mix?
Sia Taylor, who creates jewels exclusively in precious metals (to date, she doesn’t use any gemstones in her work) has similarly found fresh inspiration in the midst of what could have been a crisis, by experimenting with the type of gold alloys she works with.
Different alloys have different prices, based on the amount of pure gold used to create them. The least expensive is 9K gold with 37.5% pure gold, and the most expensive is 24K gold at 99.99%. They also have different shades: 9K yellow gold is a soft buttery yellow, while 24K has a rich, yolky hue.
It gives Taylor a wide palette, creatively and commercially. Her Shifting Skies collection uses these nuances to capture the evolving light of the day, with different alloys mimicking weak early-morning sunshine through to its mid-day zenith, sunset and the rising of the moon.
In single designs, she combines rose, yellow and white golds in weights ranging from 14K to 22K, as well as platinum, giving her 16 different colourways to play with.
“Ultimately, I think it’s positive,” says Taylor of the changes that have ensued in light of the rising gold price. “I’ve had this way of working for 20 years that’s been successful, so you don’t break away from it, but now I’m feeling like, actually, maybe this is an opportunity to do something really different.”
She could go further. “Maybe you’ve still got little droplets [as in her popular Drops collection], but instead of all being gold, some will be gold and some will be wood,” she muses. “Or maybe all these tiny little gold components are actually attached onto a beautiful linen or silk thread instead of being on the chain.”
Taylor is also planning on introducing silver, to make her existing designs more affordable for her clients who are now priced out of gold.
This is a strategy a number of brands have been turning to. Annoushka launched its first-ever silver jewellery collection last summer – a punky curation of bold rings and heavy chains called Knuckle.
So, too, did Pippa Small, who worked with artisans in Afghanistan to create a collection of highly polished, textured silver designs called Moon Pebbles.
Are there other workarounds?
Recently Arabel Lebrusan also turned to silver as a Plan B when creating a ring for a client. It was part of her Broken Stars series of jewels set with damaged gemstones, which Lebrusan salvages from workshop mishaps via a network of gem dealers.
When initially carving out the design in wax, she kept shaving off more and more volume to try and find a price that would be palatable for her client in gold or platinum. “I kept on thinking, how much is this going to cost?” she remembers.
“I ended up saying ‘to hell with this’, I’m just going to make it in silver [so I can] make the ring I want. With silver, I can still have some fun, I don’t have to compromise.”
Other playful silver projects visible in her Brighton studio include real flying insects and flower stems that she has electroformed in silver to create fragile but beautiful objects that speak to the passing of time and captured moments (she has, in the past, electroformed blooms from bridal bouquets).
There are also real axes that she has capped with coagulating silver and set with diamond and rubies, which she exhibited at London Art Fair as a narrative on the civil war in Sierra Leone that gave rise to the phrase ‘blood diamonds’.
While gold is about 65 times the price of silver, the latter has also experienced astronomical price rises, more than doubling over the past year.
It has been such a seismic shift that Pandora – the biggest silver jewellery brand on the planet – announced that it will stop using silver for 80% of its jewellery. Instead, it will create the majority of its designs in non-precious metaland plate them with platinum.
“With this innovation, we can navigate the new realities of raw material costs while off ering consumers precious metal jewellery that is exceptionally well-suited for everyday wear,” Pandora CEO Berta de Pablos-Barbi said in a statement.
Can jewellers avoid precious metals and still make luxurious collections?
This raises the question: can jewellers eschew precious metals and still make luxurious adornments we desire? Thai jeweller Patcharavipa certainly believes so.
Her latest collection, Couture Wood, launched at Dover Street Market London in February and centres around rare wood species including Moroccan Thuya, South American Snakewood and Thai Black Wood, which have been shaped by specialist artisans.
While the collection still incorporates the jeweller’s signature 18K Siam gold (a bespoke alloy blended to create a more intense hue than standard) plus diamonds and pearls, introducing wood allows it to achieve sculptural volume whilst still maintaining a lightness and wearability – best seen in collection’s domed rings that make a feature of the irregular graining and texture of the wood.
How are other jewellers getting creative?
At her workshop in an old textile mill in the Peak District, silversmith and jeweller Alice Fry wields a non-precious metal few people will have heard of: niobium. She first discovered as a jewellery-obsessed teenager when her mother took her on a day trip to the Desire jewellery fair in London.
There, she met Brian Eburah, who was using niobium to create vividly-hued jewels. Like titanium, which has become popular as an alternative metal in jewellery in recent years, niobium can be anodised to achieve shades ranging from greens and yellows to electric blues, pinks and purples.
“[Niobium] was a bit of a fad in the 80s and 90s, and at the time, [Eburah] was the only person in the UK specialising in it,” she recalls.
When Fry was in her final year at Glasgow School of Art, she thought back to her visit to Desire, and decided to start experimenting with niobium as a new way to introduce colour to her designs in a different way to her peers: “Lots of people have done gemstones, enamel, even plastics, [but] I knew about niobium, and my passion was how you can combine science and art, so I took that perspective.”
Fry has made niobium the star of all her designs ever since. “I buy it in sheets and chase it into the shapes and then colour it by hand [through anodisation],” she says, noting that the melting temperature of niobium is around 2,400 degrees Celsius.
This means that she can’t melt it down and pour it into pre made casts, like you might do with gold or silver, so it has to be manipulated by hand: “I think people like the fact that I’ve put my heart and soul
into it.”
She uses it as other designers might use gemstones, placing cleanly-faceted cuts of niobium in claw settings on silver jewels. Or, as seen in her Crystalline Crater earrings and Mineral Specimen brooches, she sets freeform cuts of textured niobium in silver.
The colour palate for jewels widens to greens, yellows, and hot pink. Another unusual jewellery metal is bismuth, which instead achieves similar colourways through heat treatment.
It has a much lower melting point of around 270 degrees Celcius, and forms geometric crystal-growth structures. Jeweller Sara Chyan has been taking advantage of this in bold, experimental necklaces and cocktail rings.
“[My use of bismuth started] as a project when I was studying at the Royal College of Art,” she says. “I was working on a project about emotional and mental relationships. When we get angry, our body temperature is higher in certain parts of the body – for example, our head will be hotter and our fingertips.
“I did my research about what kind of metal can react directly with temperatures, and how the different colours will depend on different temperatures.”
While Alice Fry admits that such alternative metals are not for everyone, she feels that more people could start to consider them if gold continues to become so elusively expensive, which is why she has decided to create one of the most mainstream jewels in niobium – wedding bands.
“When gold wedding rings are going up so much, I don’t think people are going to want to spend quite that much,” she says.
“I’m positioning [my rings] as, this is a really cool metal that’s an alternative to gold which you don’t have to pay £2,000 pounds for, you can pay £400 instead.”
The niobium will wrap around solid cores of silver or gold, melding the precious with the non-precious. Perhaps this is what this new age of alternative jewellery materials is all about: the freedom to break the staid rules of what is actually considered ‘precious’.
Whether our heads are turned by non-conformist materials because of price or creativity, a whole new world of expression is opening up.
Like this? Check out Issue 16 featuring Rivals star Aidan Turner and TIME issue featuring Jessica Ennis-Hill, available now
