Cardinal Drop Earrings

In North America the cardinal is the bird people hope to see. It stays all winter when everything else has gone, and its red against snow is the reason it carries the meanings it does: a visitor, a sign, someone remembered. It is the one bird a household will name.

Eve takes the head and shoulders and lets the rest of the bird fall away into gemstone.

The head is enamelled — a scarlet crest raised to its point, the black mask worked around the eye and beneath the bill, the orange bill drawn in two planes, and a single small diamond bezelled as the eye. Along the lower edge the enamel is cut in a ragged line and outlined in gold, so the breast finishes as plumage rather than as a border.

From that edge fall thirty-eight pear-cut orange sapphires, close to ten carats across the pair, hung on five separate strands. Every stone is jointed to the next, so each strand swings on its own. The strands are of unequal length and hang free, with no bar or frame between them: the enamelled head holds the earring, and everything below it is loose.

The colour covers the entire range a cardinal’s plumage occupies — bright orange-red, scarlet, deep crimson — with no two neighbouring stones alike. Matched to a single hue, the strands would read as fringe. Left various, they read as feathers, and they catch the light differently with every movement.

52 by 24 millimetres, in 14-karat yellow gold, and open air through the whole lower half.

Please enquire for certification and viewing.