When I select Watermelon Tourmalines for LIANA in Jaipur, I look closely at how the colours meet.
Some stones carry more pink. Others more green. Sometimes the transition is soft; sometimes there is a clear line between them.
No two hold those colours in quite the same way.
That is what draws me to them.
Not an abstract idea of perfection or imperfection. Something much more specific: the details that make me look again.
What is Watermelon Tourmaline?
Watermelon Tourmaline is a natural gemstone with pink and green colour zones within the same stone. Its colour pattern forms as the crystal grows.
The proportions and transitions vary. I select every stone personally, rather than asking them all to look identical.
That also means the stone in your piece may look different from the one in a photograph. Its own colour pattern belongs to it.
We are very inconsistent about what we call character
There are things we admire in people that we spend enormous amounts of energy trying to remove from everything else.
History. Contradiction. Evidence that something happened.
The person who has lived in five countries is interesting because those places changed her.
The old wooden table is beautiful partly because somebody actually used it.
A face becomes recognisable through the details that make it different from every other face.
We understand this almost instinctively.
And yet we are surrounded by versions of beauty that are trying very hard to look untouched.
I don’t think untouched is bad.
I just no longer think it is automatically more beautiful.
There is a difference.
Maybe this is why perfection can become strangely anonymous
The more I worked on LIANA, the more I noticed that I was not interested in creating objects that looked as if nothing had ever happened to them.
That would make very little sense for a brand built around the opposite idea.
LIANA began because I kept thinking about the things that change us.
The decisions we cannot undo. Places that became part of us. People we loved. People we left. Versions of ourselves that made complete sense once and no longer do.
None of that leaves us visually perfect in the metaphorical sense.
But I also don’t think the point of a life is to leave it looking unused.
That thought is probably much closer to why I chose these stones than a claim that every stone should look the same.
The strange thing about marks is that their meaning depends on where we find them
We are not neutral about evidence of change.
A mark on a brand-new object can make us disappointed.
The same mark ten years later can be the reason we refuse to replace it.
A scar can be something somebody wants to hide, or the most ordinary part of their body.
An old photograph can be objectively worse than a new one and still be the one we would save first.
The physical thing has not changed.
Its relationship to our life has.
And I think this is the part I keep returning to.
Meaning is rarely contained entirely inside an object.
We bring history to it.
We decide what deserves to be remembered.
Sometimes we even change our minds about the very thing we once wanted to erase.
I don’t choose these stones only because they are a metaphor
This distinction matters to me.
I don’t want every stone to arrive with a compulsory life lesson attached to it.
A tourmaline does not know anything about resilience.
Silver does not know that you survived something.
Jewelry does not transform a person simply because somebody wrote a beautiful description next to it.
We are the ones who give objects meaning.
That is why the same ring can be nothing more than a ring to one person and completely irreplaceable to another.
The object becomes important because of what happened around it.
Maybe that is also why I kept coming back to stones that already looked individual before anybody had even worn them.
They did not need to be made interesting.
I only needed to look closely enough to see what was already there.
And perhaps that is the part of “perfection” I have become less interested in over the years.
Not perfection itself.
The assumption that the absence of visible history is automatically the highest form of beauty.
I don’t think I believe that anymore.
— Melissa