Cerulean Orchid Earrings

Blue is the colour nature gives most sparingly. Among the twenty-five thousand or so species of orchid, scarcely any of them are truly blue, and the blue orchids offered in shops are almost always white flowers that have been dyed. The one that carries it naturally is Vanda coerulea, the blue Vanda, which grows wild through northern Thailand and the hills on either side.

What makes that flower extraordinary is that its blue is never a single colour. Each petal is laid out in a tessellated pattern — a fine grid of deeper blue over a paler ground, so the surface reads as a mesh of tone rather than as a wash, and the colour seems to move as the light shifts across it. Nature’s rarest colour, delivered in a dozen shades at once.

That pattern is the whole reason for 28.18 carats of sapphire set in many stones rather than a few. The petals are assembled from sapphires running the entire length of the scale: pale, near-colourless stones at one end, through every mid-blue, to full midnight at the other. Set close together and alternated deliberately across the surface, they compose a field with variation living inside it, the lighter stones catching where light falls and the darker ones holding depth beneath — the same tessellation the flower wears, carried in corundum.

Oval sapphires of the deepest saturation are placed at the centre of each petal and at the heart of the flower, anchoring the pattern and giving the eye its points of rest. Sapphire is graded by how far its colour sits from grey, and assembling a run this broad means buying right across that scale rather than to one target hue — the reverse of how a parcel is usually matched, and far more demanding.

The pair is deliberately mismatched. Each earring is its own orchid, the petals turned a different way, so what hangs at either ear is two flowers rather than a design and its mirror image. Within each earring nothing is symmetrical either: the petals differ in size and curl at their edges instead of lying flat, which is precisely how an orchid presents itself on the stem.

Twenty-five pearls sit proud of the surface and off the line of the petals, resting above the plane of the sapphire rather than within it. Diamonds of 2.61 carats fill the ground between the coloured stones and run the length of the stem, which carries a fully set flower head at the end of a long curve.

The face measures 70 by 46 millimetres — a substantial pair, and scaled so the pattern has room to be read across the whole of it. In 14-karat white gold.

Please enquire for certification and viewing.