When you’re in the jewelry business, you think about the body in a different way. All of the sudden, a hand can be naked. An ear lobe can look lonely. A wrist? Muffled, silent, a singer without a song and a dancer without a partner.
Last week on the blog, we featured the Silver Celtic Stone Set Trinity Bracelet and playfully tugged away at popular culture’s take on the wrist with Wonder Woman’s magical bracelets and the mysterious origins of “It’s all in the wrist.”
While comic books and sayings expose a side to the wrist that isn’t readily apparent, charm bracelets are different. With the charm bracelet is another way to express yourself. As ironic as we want, as humorous as we want, as sincere and heartwarming as we want—all on the wrist. Clinking and dangling each time we reach for this and grab for that, the wearer becomes a veritable and dynamic heuristic to the soul.
When Queen Victoria’s Prince Albert died, she made up “mourning charms” filled with “lockets of hair from the deceased, miniature portraits of the deceased, charm bracelets carved in jet.” Knights used to wear charms for good luck when they went into battle. WWII GIs returned from home with charms for their loved ones. You can imagine these charms, handmade from villages they liberated, or gotten in a barter with someone they met on the way. We are never the ring or the necklace or the bracelet, but we can communicate and remember through these objects. And of all, charms and the bracelets from which they hang, are unrivaled in this way.
The Shanore Celtic Trinity Peridot Tribal Bracelet fixes the eye with its elegant cluster of enjoined loops, cast in sterling silver and cinched 7.75 inches long, with the iconic celtic tribal design on every interwoven link. Evoking Celtic imagery, the tribal design appears hewn by hand, smoothed to a mirror finish but allowed intricate variation evoking the scoring you’d find in the work by an ancient silversmith who knew just how far such a metal could be worked and yet remain solid. Worn with additional charms or as is, the tribal design evokes at once an entirety of ancient symbolism and a virtual tabula rasa, a blank space there for you to make your own.
Are you all about charm bracelets? Are you a man who wears a charm bracelet? We’d love to read all about it in our comment section! And don’t forget to check out our August Giveaway!
Photo Credit: US National Archives (man hanging arm outside of car)
