Before there were vitrines and velvet trays, before the soft tyranny of the four C’s, there were hands—human hands—warming stones at the mouth of a fire. Jewelry began not as adornment but as argument: with the invisible, with illness, with fate, with time. Long before language learned to flatter itself, people wore the earth to persuade it.
Archaeology keeps finding the same quiet insistence across prehistoric sites: shells drilled and strung, hematite rubbed into ochre, beads buried with the dead. These were not decorative afterthoughts. They were technologies—portable cosmologies—meant to conduct protection, fertility, memory, and power. The body was the first altar, and jewelry its liturgy.
What we now call “semiprecious” would have puzzled those early wearers. The hierarchy is modern; the faith is ancient. Lapis lazuli, carnelian, turquoise, quartz, copper, gold—each carried a grammar of meaning that varied by culture but agreed on one essential premise: matter remembers, and matter transmits.
Nowhere is this more legible than in Africa, where jewelry has long operated at the intersection of the spiritual, the medical, the political, and the aesthetic—categories that modern Western thought prefers to keep separate.
In ancient Egypt, stones were not merely beautiful; they were operative. Lapis lazuli, with its night-sky blue flecked by gold, was associated with the heavens and with divine speech; it appeared in amulets, eye inlays, and royal regalia.
Carnelian—warm, blood-toned—was worn for vitality and protection, especially in childbirth and the afterlife. Green stones like malachite and feldspar were linked to regeneration and health, their color echoing the annual resurrection of the Nile’s banks.
Gold, incorruptible and luminous, was not wealth so much as theology: the flesh of the gods, immune to decay. Jewelry here functioned medicinally (amulets prescribed for specific ailments), spiritually (talismans for safe passage between worlds), and politically (the right to certain materials and forms marked proximity to power).
Move west to what is now Nigeria, and jewelry becomes even more explicitly social. Among the Yoruba, coral beads—imported, rare, and vividly alive in color—signified kingship and spiritual authority. They were worn by oba not simply to be seen, but to be recognized by the ancestors.
Among the Edo people of Benin, brass and bronze jewelry and regalia recorded history itself, casting power into metal through the lost-wax process. Beads, stones, and metals operated as archives, medicine, and mandate all at once.
In Ethiopia, crosses carved from silver and stone, often worn close to the heart, fused devotion with defense. Agate, carnelian, and other stones were believed to ward off illness and misfortune; metals were chosen as much for their energetic properties as their durability. Jewelry here was prayer you could touch, faith you could fasten.
Across these cultures, color mattered. Texture mattered. Provenance mattered. What did not matter—at least not in the way we have come to insist—was colorlessness.
Precious by Decree—The Rise of the Diamond and the Fall of Meaning
The modern Western coronation of the diamond as “King” is a surprisingly recent ceremony, and a curiously thin one. Its authority rests less on ancient reverence than on narrative discipline: a story told so frequently and so persuasively that it began to feel like nature. The diamond’s supposed virtues—its clarity, its hardness, its refusal of color—were moralized into metaphors of purity, permanence, and worth. Desire was refined into doctrine; scarcity was managed; price followed story.
Even after the truths of blood diamonds surfaced—truths that linked sparkle to suffering—the narrative proved resilient. Diamonds remained the pentacle of establishment, the sanctioned symbol of love, commitment, and arrival. Unobtainable for many, unquestioned by most.
The Problem With Colorless Stones—A Brief History of Power, Stones, and the Stories We Tell About Them
But colorlessness is not neutrality, and whiteness is not flawlessness. White does not equate to purity. White does not equate to power. In the physics of light, white is not the apex but the blend—easily penetrated, converted, transmuted. Beyond the visible spectrum, past violet and into the unseen, lies higher energy still. Power, it turns out, is not always what looks cleanest under a showroom lamp.
“One must enter the dark in order to most clearly see the light,” the old saying goes, and it feels less like poetry than instruction.
If any stone deserves a reconsideration of its crown, quartz would be an honest candidate. Classified narratively as “semiprecious,” quartz is, in practice, indispensable. It regulates time in our watches, stabilizes frequencies in our phones and computers, enables the very technologies through which modern life coheres. Quartz does not merely signify value; it performs it. It is both beautiful and useful, aesthetic and functional—truthfully good, not just convincingly so.
This is where intentional jewelry reenters the conversation—not as trend, but as correction.
Long before the conscious awakening of my own consciousness, what I knew about jewelry followed modern Western standards. Diamond was King. Precious was superior to semiprecious. Value was a function of price. Even when the truths behind the diamond industry were revealed, the hierarchy remained largely intact.
Worn Earth—Why I No Longer Crown the Diamond
Now, working deliberately with semiprecious stones and natural materials, I find myself undoing those lessons bead by bead. Intentional jewelry asks different questions: What does this material carry? Where did it come from? What story does it tell against the skin? It privileges resonance over resale, meaning over market. There is an organic honesty to these materials. They age. They warm. They respond. They refuse the sterile perfection that has been sold to us as aspiration. And in that refusal, they feel closer to the ways jewelry has always functioned: as conduit, as companion, as quiet technology of the self.
After more than 10,000 hours of research and craftsmanship, what feels most valuable is not mastery, but participation—in a lineage that stretches from prehistoric fires to contemporary studios, from African courts and shrines to modern hands seeking something truer than a receipt.
View My Made by Hand Jewelry Gallery
Entering the Dark to See the Light—The Myth of the Precious
The recent documentary Nothing Lasts Forever pulls back the velvet curtain on the diamond industry’s ongoing crisis, revealing criminal investigations, manufactured scarcity, and the fragility of a value system built more on secrecy than substance. It forces a reconsideration not only of diamonds, but of value itself—how it is created, protected, and sold.
On Wearing the Earth—Adornment as Technology
Perhaps semiprecious gemstones have always understood something we are only beginning to relearn: that value lives in relationship. In use. In meaning assigned and reassigned by the beholder. That what we wear can be less about declaring status and more about aligning intention. Jewelry, after all, has never just been about looking good. It has been about being well—spiritually, culturally, technologically. The earth has been offering us its materials for millennia, not to rank them, but to work with them. The rest is narrative. And narratives, unlike stones, can be changed.
Related Article: The Unbelievable Story of Saniniu Laizer and His Miraculous Discoveries.
Keep Shining,
Your Friendly Wellness Oracle | Brand Architect | Glow Strategist 💎🌺💼
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