Vintage Amber Glass Earrings

Vintage Amber Glass Earrings

Amber, and something moving inside it.

Hold one up to the light. The outer glass is the colour of tea held to a window — translucent, warm, a little uneven where the surface catches. Inside, sealed in the middle of it, a square of metal leaf that has broken into a green-gold crackle. The fracture lines run in no pattern at all. They can't. That break is what happens when leaf meets moving glass, and it happens differently every single time.

The technique is old. Metal leaf is beaten until it's around a fifth of a micron thick — thin enough that the movement of air in a workshop will carry it off, so the sheets are cut small and handled almost without breathing. It's laid onto hot glass, then covered with a clear layer and sealed in. The moment the glass is worked, the leaf shatters into fragments, and the glass around it multiplies each fragment in reflection. That's the shimmer. Glass and gold have been put together this way since antiquity, revived by the Venetians in the fifteenth century, and it has never been mechanised, because the effect depends entirely on what the metal does when nobody is controlling it.

Which means the piece is a record of a few seconds of someone's hands. Nobody chose where those green lines would fall.

Set into a gold-plated cup with the corners folded over the glass, and finished with clip fittings — no piercing needed. At 1.5cm they sit flat against the lobe with no drop, close and contained.

On the ear the amber reads as warmth rather than colour, and the green centre only appears when you turn. From a step away, two small points of light beside the jaw. Up close, someone finds the crackle and looks at it properly.

They belong with wool, with camel and cream and brown, with a face without much other jewellery. Small pieces like this don't announce anything. They just mean the person wearing them chose something, and chose it carefully.

Material: Brass, gold metal plating, coloured glass with metal leaf
Era: 1970s–90s
Size: approx. 1.5cm
Fittings: Clip-on
Condition: In very good vintage condition.
Made in, or sourced from: Australia

Turning — collection

Leaves turn. The light goes low and amber. Nothing announces itself — you simply notice, one morning, that the air has changed.

Turning is the autumn chapter of Passage. Four days, four quiet scenes from the weeks when summer lets go, and sixteen pieces drawn from the colours and the air of that shift.

Nothing here is dressed for the season. Some pieces are ornate, some almost plain. They were simply waiting when the light changed, held until now by hands we'll never know.

However you move through these days, we hope something here finds its way to you.