Pineapple Drop Earrings

For three hundred years in Europe the pineapple was the grandest thing a host could set on a table — rented for the evening, displayed rather than eaten, and carved into gateposts and bedheads by anyone who wished to be thought capable of affording one. It has always been an ornament first. These earrings simply return it to that role.

The fruit is read downward, as it grows. A pear-cut peridot at the ear, set point-down, sharp and green: the crown. Below it a cushion in deep red-orange, the colour of the skin as it ripens. Then an oval citrine. Then the largest stone of all — a broad pear citrine, deep gold and set point-down, which is the flesh of the fruit and the whole reason the earring exists.

Two oval peridots sit either side of that final citrine, angled to lift away from it. They are the only stones off the central line, and they are what turns a descending column of colour into a pineapple.

A small bezelled diamond sits between each stone, giving every colour its own clear space and keeping the sequence legible the whole way down.

Yellow gold throughout. Peridot, citrine and the red cushion are all warm stones, and yellow gold keeps them in one family — the metal reads as part of the fruit rather than as a frame around it.

Everything is claw-set with the girdle left open, so light enters from behind and carries through. On a drop this long, that is what keeps the lower stones alight against the jaw.

This pair has been sold.