For a clear head
Broken Light — Mystic Quartz & Topaz Ring
Worn for centuries by people who needed to see the situation as it was.
This one has no ancient story, and I am not going to invent one.
Made after you order it · up to 20 days · 925 sterling silver
- 01 A stone is chosen for your order by hand, held to the light.
- 02 It is set in solid silver and cut to your size, finished, and checked.
- 03 It rests, and is wrapped by hand with its card — the stone, and the date it was finished.
- 04 Dispatched with tracking. Up to twenty days.
- Free delivery, no minimum
- Tracked worldwide
- 14-day returns
The story
Every other stone in this collection has a mythology behind it that is older than any country currently on a map.
This one has no ancient story, and I am not going to invent one.
Mystic quartz is clear natural quartz with an extremely thin metallic film bonded to the surface — usually titanium — laid down in a vacuum chamber. The film is a fraction of a wavelength thick, which means light bouncing off the top of it and light bouncing off the bottom of it interfere with each other, and the colour you see is that interference. Not a pigment. Not a dye. Geometry.
It is the same physics as a soap bubble, an oil slick on a wet road, and a beetle's back.
The technique is from the 1990s and comes out of optical coating — the industry that makes camera lenses and telescope mirrors — which is a strange and rather lovely place for a gemstone to have come from.
It will wear. A coating on a ring that is worn daily for years will eventually thin at the points where it meets the world. I would rather you knew that at the start.
So: the stone is natural. The colour is engineered, and modern, and I like it anyway. There is a difference between a thing that pretends to be old and a thing that is simply new, and only one of those is dishonest.
Set with swiss blue topaz alongside it, in a cluster that catches light from several directions at once. It is the most straightforwardly sparkling piece in the collection.
925 sterling silver. Made after you order it, up to twenty days.
£199 at launch, £219 after.
Materials
- Natural quartz with a titanium surface coating (mystic quartz) — 8×10 mm oval and 6×9 mm pear
- Natural swiss blue topaz — 5×7 mm, 4×6 mm and 4×4 mm, colour-treated
- White and smoky cubic zirconia accent stones
- 925 sterling silver
- Made to order, up to 20 days
No folklore for this one. It is a hundred-year-old branch of optics sitting on your finger, which I think is enough.
Broken Light — Mystic Quartz & Topaz Ring
Every frame is the piece itself, photographed as it is — topaz, set in solid sterling silver.
Topaz
A stone that has been answering to somebody else’s name for two thousand years.
-
01
The one everybody knows
Clear sight
Carried for centuries by people who needed to see a situation as it actually was rather than as they would have preferred it.
European lapidaries -
02
Less known
The wrong name
Pliny recorded a green stone from a Red Sea island called Topazios. The island produced peridot and never produced topaz. Everyone worked it out and nobody was willing to renumber Western mineralogy over it.
Named in error, c. 77 AD -
03
Almost nobody knows
A colour younger than your parents
Sky blue topaz did not exist before about 1970. Colourless topaz - common and cheap - is irradiated and then heated. The stone is natural. The colour is ours, and permanent.
Irradiation process, from 1970
All of the above is history and folklore, written down because it is real and it is interesting. It is not a claim about what the stone will do. Some people feel something. Some don’t. More in The Codex
Everything we can tell you
-
01
The stone
Topaz. What we know about the material in this piece is written on the page above, in the measurements we were given. Where a stone is lab-grown or treated we say so by name. We never call a treated stone natural, and we never use the phrase “semi-precious”.
Read what it has been carried for → -
02
The metal
Solid 925 sterling silver. We never plate base metal, and we never describe plating as solid gold.
How to keep it → -
03
Made after you order
Nothing here sits in a warehouse. Work begins when the order does, and the piece takes up to 20 days before it ships. Your ring size is cut at that point, which is why we ask for it at checkout.
Making & delivery → -
04
Size & fit
Ring sizes run 4.5 to 10 (UK J to U). Measure warm, at the end of the day, and take the reading three times.
How to measure at home →
- Free UK delivery
- 30-day returns
- Hallmarked 925 silver
- Nickel-safe fittings
- Gift box included
