Heart of Spring Ring

Rain settles on a lotus leaf and refuses to soak in. It gathers instead into a bead that sits high on the surface, holding its own shape, catching the light and sliding whole across the leaf when it tilts. That is the image behind this ring.

The mother of pearl is the leaf. Cut to irregular profiles and set to overlap, it spreads broad and open across the finger with the shifting sheen of a wet surface — a leaf seen after rain, its gloss moving as the hand moves.

The peridot is the drop of water held upon it. A heart cut of 13 by 13 millimetres, around nine carats, raised clear at the centre and left as the one fixed, faceted thing among all that softness. At this size peridot shows its double refraction plainly: look down into the stone and the rear facets appear twice over. It is how olivine behaves, and very few gems reveal it so openly — the same doubling one sees when looking through water.

Peridot takes its green from the iron within its own structure rather than from a trace element borrowed from elsewhere, which is why it can be no other colour. That green is the yellowest a leaf ever reaches, in the weeks before the season thickens it towards summer.

A table of 45 by 45 millimetres, in 14-karat yellow gold — the warm line that carries the whole.

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