The Forum · BBC World Service

The enduring allure of jewellery

November 16, 2024·49 min·3 clips

Finnish gemologist Petra Ardedeel stopped making jewellery entirely after her PhD research convinced her the world had too many products—but now says recycled gold alone could supply the entire industry if people returned unloved pieces from their jewel cases.

1. The Forum from the BBC World Service, hosted by Izzy Lawrence, dedicates this episode to jewellery: its history, meaning, craft, and the reasons humans have worn it for 100,000 years. 2. The three panellists are Dr. Emily Storer, Senior Curator of Jewellery at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and author of several books on American jewellery; Emma Foucault, jewellery maker born in Ghana and curator of Diaspora Jewellery at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; and Dr. Petra Ardedeel, a Finnish gemologist and jeweller who lectures at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. 3. The episode's central question is why jewellery—rings, bracelets, necklaces, earrings—has persisted in essentially the same forms across 100,000 years of human history and what that endurance reveals about human nature. 4. Emily's chosen object is a 60-carat Mughal emerald brooch in the Boston MFA collection, formerly owned by American heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post; the stone was mined in 16th-century Ecuador or Colombia, carved in 17th-century India around the time of the Taj Mahal, and redesigned as a brooch in 1920s New York. 5. Emma's chosen object is a titanium brooch by Hong Kong master jeweller Wallace Chan, valued for representing a living craftsman whose work will 'be studied for centuries to come.' 6. World Service listeners contribute accounts of personally meaningful pieces: a Norwegian woman's bracelet bearing her late husband's thumbprint, a Ghanaian-American woman's engagement ring engraved with six Adinkra symbols chosen by her husband, and a traveller from Hungary who received a ring from a young Tajik woman near the Afghan border as a spontaneous gift of generosity. 7. Emily argues that jewellery's formal stability—the same ring, bracelet, necklace, and earring forms used for 100,000 years—is explained by the fact that it is always worn on the body, and the human body has not changed, unlike walls or other surfaces that hold decorative objects. 8. Emma Foucault describes growing up hearing stories of people finding gold nuggets in the sand after rain in Ghana, then discovering the Asanti people's mastery of lost wax gold casting, and eventually being granted personal permission by the Asantihene—king of the Asanti—to apprentice with his court goldsmith, a role historically forbidden to women. 9. A Forum listener from Pakistan, Mahbash, describes the physical pain of heavy Indian wedding jewellery: earrings that can tear and elongate the earlobe, metal necklaces that become 'biting cold' in winter, and the detail that the first piece a bride removes in the bridal chamber is always her earrings. 10. Mansi Rao, curator of the South Asia Collection in Norwich, explains two South Indian Hindu wedding markers: the Thali (a gold pendant on a turmeric-thread necklace tied by the groom, worn by the bride for life) and toe rings; she also recounts the ritual in which the groom's aunts help him string 108 tiny-holed black beads onto the thread, teaching him through the painstaking task that 'this is how hard a marriage is.' 11. Emma describes Fulani wedding jewellery in West Africa—massive gold earrings supported by red silk threads through the ear—as a form of stored and transferable wealth passed down through generations alongside the stories that go with it. 12. Gemologist Petra reveals that the first commercial synthetic gemstones were produced by Vernal in Paris in 1902, who synthesized corundum (the mineral family of rubies and sapphires) by adding chromium oxide for red and titanium-iron compounds for blue. 13. Petra's most counterintuitive claim is that sapphires are culturally associated with blue—despite natural sapphires coming in almost every color—specifically because Vernal chose to commercialize the blue synthetic variety, embedding that association globally throughout the twentieth century. 14. Emily describes how synthetic gemstones and new plastics introduced the concept of 'costume jewellery' into American fashion magazines as early as 1916, freeing Art Nouveau and Art Deco jewellery makers to prioritize artistic experimentation over costly materials. 15. Petra argues for the environmental sustainability of gold: it is almost never discarded, already 30-40% recycled in the industry, and in theory the existing stock of unloved and broken pieces in people's jewel cases could fully supply the jewellery industry without any new mining. 16. Emily notes that jewellery's value is not straightforwardly linked to age: some older pieces look strikingly modern and vice versa, and emotional value often disappears across generations, which is why so many heirlooms end up in auction houses. 17. The gender of jewellery-making is discussed: an Austrian archaeological site revealed a prehistoric female jewellery worker, but the 19th-20th century Western industry was dominated by men; today, Petra's master's programme at the University of Gothenburg has an entirely female student cohort. 18. The programme mixes expert panel discussion with audio contributions from World Service listeners in Norway, Ghana, Nigeria, Hungary, Pakistan, Ukraine, Singapore, and the United States, giving the episode a global texture. 19. The episode will most appeal to listeners interested in the history of decorative arts, anthropology of material culture, craft traditions across West Africa and South Asia, and the environmental politics of luxury goods. 20. Listeners seeking in-depth technical instruction on jewellery-making techniques or gemology will find the episode too broad and listener-centred to meet that need.

As heard by us

A thoughtful BBC conversation on jewellery as craft, memory, value and self-expression.

Jewellery is treated here as more than ornament: a portable record of memory, taste, craft and private attachment. Izzy Lawrence opens with listeners describing pieces they wear every day, then the conversation moves through museum collections, old family jewellery, auction…

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Why you'd press play

For when you want jewellery treated as memory, art, and value, all at once.

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