What do we really ask of a jewel ? Beauty, of course. But sometimes courage too, a memory, a presence. Colette Jewelry’s Santos y Cielos collection, a true amulet jewelry line, answers this quiet expectation with enamel medals, saints and talismans worn close to the heart, the way one keeps a secret.
Santos y Cielos: A Collection Born of Mourning
French-Mexican, based in Los Angeles and trained as a gemologist, Colette Steckel founded her house in 1995. Santos y Cielos, “saints and heavens,” is probably her most intimate collection. She has been developing it since her father’s passing in December 2017, and it grew out of the medallions she once made for him to bring him luck and protection.
Launched in spring 2020, in the midst of global uncertainty, the collection found an immediate echo. One senses the shadow of the Baroque churches of Spain, Portugal and Central America, where fear drives people to seek protection from above.
There is nothing merely decorative, then, about its origin. Here the jewel is a gesture of love, a way of watching over someone we cannot accompany everywhere.
Limoges Enamel and Flea-Market Treasures: The Art of Detail
On the craft side, Santos y Cielos wins you over with its quiet erudition. Several pieces feature medals depicting the Virgin, putti and Christ, hand-painted on porcelain using the Limoges enamel technique. The designer says she draws on Renaissance painting for these miniatures. Each medal is fired in a kiln at 800 degrees, then set in an 18-karat yellow gold frame, enhanced with diamonds, sapphires or other gemstones.
The collection’s other guiding thread is a love of the antique hunt. Medals, charms and watch chains were unearthed in the antique markets of Paris and London, then married to contemporary elements. A nineteenth-century ex-voto sits alongside a diamond; a waistcoat chain is adorned with an enamel Madonna.
The repertoire is that of popular devotion: the Virgin, the Infant Jesus, cherubs, and even Padre Pio. Answering them are more universal talismans, such as the heart, the fist of protection or the evil eye.
The Talisman Jewel: A Very Old Story
The word “amulet” comes from the Latin amuletum, already found in Pliny the Elder. Children in ancient Rome wore the bulla around their necks, a gold capsule meant to ward off danger. The pharaohs surrounded themselves with scarabs and Eyes of Horus, medieval travelers with reliquaries, and nineteenth-century France saw the birth, on the rue du Bac in Paris, of the Miraculous Medal, worn by millions of the faithful.
Colette Jewelry belongs to this lineage without pastiche. Every era has had its amulets, and none has ever stopped needing them. In an age of speed and uncertainty, the need for small, reassuring objects is no naive superstition: it is a way of staying upright.
What Does Protective Jewelry Protect ? On the Jewel’s Reason to Exist
What does a jewel protect, ultimately? Rarely the body. Almost always something invisible: a memory, a promise, a fragility. The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott spoke of the “transitional object” to describe what a child clutches in order to face absence. The amulet is its adult version, discreet and precious: it does not ward off fate, it gives us the courage to face it.
The designer puts it in her own way : a jewel can act as armor that keeps harm at bay, and each of us can build an assortment of talismans to hold close to the heart as we face our days. This armor is not martial; it is made of fine gold, enamel and feeling.
Here we touch a conviction that runs through the whole approach of the house: a jewel should not exist merely to decorate. It must say something about the person who wears it, a memory, an emotion, a part of their story. Creation springs from intuition, sometimes a remarkable stone, sometimes a shape, a symbol or a persistent image, followed until it takes form, letting the material and the idea find each other. A piece is then recognized by what it makes one feel, rather than by what it shows. It has character, and above all a reason to exist.
Santos y Cielos is the clearest demonstration: each medal answers a precise need, to protect, to console, to remember.
Signature Jewelry, a Luxury of Meaning
The pieces are often unique. Some necklaces, set with painted medallions surrounded by diamonds, sapphires, rubies and tsavorites, are one-of-a-kind creations. The attention to detail, the rarity of the antique elements and the artist’s own hand place the collection in the realm of signature jewelry.
Yet its true luxury lies elsewhere: in its ability to turn an object into a companion. The international press took notice, and Rihanna was seen wearing a signet ring from the collection during a Vogue shoot. The talisman, decidedly, has its devotees.
A jewel may not shield us from the world. Yet it reminds us that someone, one day, thought of protecting us.
