A few weeks ago I lost the stone from a ring I’ve worn half my life. It’s okay, my husband said, no one’s hurt or sick, it’s just a thing, we can replace it. I knew he was right, but I didn’t like the sight of my hand without the familiar sparkle. I’d looked at that gem while giving birth, for courage before going on stage, during high-stakes conversations with healthcare providers and border guards. It hadn’t been expensive, as these things go – we didn’t really have disposable income at the time we bought it – but it had delighted me, even though I was well aware of the politics of these things.
The jewellery a man gives a woman is a gift, a token of love, but also a token of ownership and often a display of wealth. It’s not, of course, the diamonds that are a girl’s best friend – they won’t listen to you late at night or cross continents to hold your hand when your life falls apart – but the status and power they encode. And I’m not much into ownership, or status and power, but I knew that was not the spirit in which my ring was offered and to me it meant other, better things.
Jewellery is complicated. “Tell me about your jewellery” is an oddly intimate question considering that jewellery is usually worn visibly. Often it has a set of meanings for the wearer invisible to anyone else, but it is also a very visible status symbol. Unlike clothing, jewellery never enhances physical comfort so there’s always some cost for wearing it, a price we have revealing reasons to pay.
[ People trying to sell diets enrage me on good days. On bad days I feel inadequateOpens in new window ]
If you come from a refugee background, you know it’s one of the things you must take when you have to run, a highly portable and globally recognised store of value. The traditional association of adornment with women makes it especially important, because in many cultures women with little access to other forms of capital still own their gold. Hide it, in your underwear or in your body when you have to. But at the same time as being readily exchangeable, the metal and stones we wear are so personal that they can be used to identify our bodies made unrecognisable by water or fire. They outlast us, and in orderly dying we pass them on, transferring both meaning and value down the generations.
Jewellery might not always leave us with a clear conscience but it’s fun, and pleasure is not trivial
People trying to sell diets enrage me on good days. On bad days I feel inadequate
Women are safer on the streets and men are safer at home, despite the stories we tell ourselves
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And also, I am rediscovering as we go about replacing my lost treasure that jewellery is fun, and pleasure is not trivial. Sparkle is not a necessity for survival, but metaphorically it is essential because aesthetic delight is part of what makes us human and what we share as humans. History and archaeology show us that people living very hard lives in very insecure situations still adorn their bodies and their clothes, still find dignity and pleasure in whatever small beauties are possible in the face of scarcity and hard work. You could, I suppose – some would – argue that in dark times it’s unpardonable frivolity to be concerned with prettiness and pleasure, especially with one’s own prettiness and pleasure, but I’d say that when we lose the capacity for small, personal joys – and there are circumstances in which we do – darkness has prevailed.
Our failure to save the world is not because we don’t know what to do but because we decline to do it
And at the same time, the prettiness of jewellery comes at a cost, not only the price paid by the wearer but the less visible depletion of the planet and the people who extract precious metals and gems from the Earth. It’s very hard to find metal or gemstones that a fully informed consumer could wear with a clear conscience. But then it’s quite hard to find anything that a fully informed consumer can wear or eat or use with a clear conscience, which doesn’t mean we should give up, only that we have to come to individual ways through disturbed and disturbing global structures of wealth and power. We already know some of those ways: reduce, reuse, recycle (jewellery too).
Our failure to save the world is not because we don’t know what to do but because we decline to do it. And I would, in the end, defend little pleasures, sparkly rings, as among the human necessities we’ll want when we come, some of us, ready or not, to the other side of those broken systems.
