Be warned, the new mood in jewels is deeply personal. Not since Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton turned up on the red carpet wearing lockets containing each other’s blood has jewellery been so intimate.
Jewellery designer Diane Kordas was first inspired to create Amulette, a collection of scent phials that launches this month, following a night swim near her home on the Greek island of Mykonos. “One of the things that first attracted me to you was your smell,” her husband Steve confided while swimming alongside her. The exchange was enough to persuade Kordas to study the power of fragrance for the following year. “It’s such a connector,” she explains. “I wanted to work out a way to encapsulate people’s scent.”
The resulting Amulettes are suspended on long golden chains designed in his-and-hers styles in sleek rose and black gold, set with white or black diamonds. Steve’s phial contains a splash of Bulgari’s Omnia to recall his wife at any given moment, while Kordas’s contains some Issey Miyake mixed with a little sweat. Sounds delightful. “It reminds me of when I was a student at Parsons in New York,” says Kordas. “I’d go to see Steve when he’d just come off the soccer field,” she sighs. “It’s so sexy.”