Ruby Flutter Earrings

A butterfly, taken to its essentials. Eve has kept the sweep of a single wing — scalloped along one edge, drawn to a soft point at the other — and let the creature be suggested rather than described. The result reads as a wing the moment you see it, and as pure abstract form a moment later.

Each wing is carved from one piece of mother of pearl. A single plate, cut to its irregular outline and domed rather than left flat, so light travels slowly across the surface and the pink within the shell shifts as the head turns. Carving a plate at this size from one piece begins long before the bench: the shell must be large enough, even enough in colour across its whole span, and sound enough throughout to take the drilling for every setting. Very few pieces of shell will do it, and the one-piece carving is what gives the wing its unbroken sweep.

Rubies are set into the surface in pear and round cuts, each bezelled in yellow gold, at varying sizes and with no fixed spacing between them. They fall as markings fall on a natural wing — gathered in places, standing alone in others, the largest set away from the centre.

Three are treated differently: a round ruby within a hexagonal diamond frame, a pear within a diamond-outlined comma, and a third outline curving around a pear and leaving it open. At 0.26 carats the diamonds are drawing lines rather than adding brilliance, and they give the eye three places to rest.

Yellow gold throughout, and deliberately so. The shell is warm pink and the rubies warm red; in yellow the bezels belong to the surface they sit in and the whole wing stays in one register of colour.

Beneath hangs a South Sea pearl of 12 to 15 millimetres, suspended from a notch cut into the base of the plate — the single element that moves, and the single white in the piece. At that size it does what the shell above it does: releases light gently rather than throwing it back.

The South Sea pearl detaches. Worn complete, the earring runs to a 48-millimetre drop. With the pearl removed, the carved wing is worn on its own — shorter, lighter, and entirely resolved as a piece in its own right.

In 14-karat yellow gold.

Please enquire for certification and viewing.