Lynn Yaeger on the Pleasure of Getting Fantastic Jewels for On your own

The other young ones had been preserving up for bicycles and roller skates. I experienced some thing else in brain. It was a 14-karat gold coronary heart locket with a little diamond at its centre and a frame within to keep a image of your sweetheart, which in my scenario was John Lennon. If the proprietress of the jewellery shop in Massapequa, New York, was asking yourself what this 12-yr-outdated was performing in her store day just after working day, she didn’t let on. I saved up my allowance cash, wheedled and begged my softie mother and father to chip in, and, finally, I purchased that sucker for myself.

I nonetheless have it. I understood it when I was in junior superior, and I know it these days: Purchasing jewelry for yourself is a person of the most enjoyable, joyful, lifestyle-affirming ordeals you can have. Who needs to wait close to until a passionate husband or wife stumbles into your existence, and why should really this hapless soul be expected to know that what you seriously want is a Brent Neale 3-stone ring or an Arman Sarkisyan bird bracelet? They may well be the most amazing individual in the entire world, but isn’t it as well a lot to anticipate that they recognize the variance in between Boucheron and Bulgari, Lalaounis and Lalique?

Lest you persist in the perception that there is one thing a little unhappy about acquiring wonderful jewelry for on your own, I would argue just the opposite—there is a thing depressing about not acquiring points you really want, that you can pay for, since of some aged-fashioned notion that you are not deserving of marking your own particular milestones with jewelry that is exactly your flavor because, properly, you picked it out. Why is it okay to invest in your living place a dazzling chandelier but not all correct to devote the exact quantity on a pair of chandelier earrings? Why are you at ease obtaining a wildly highly-priced snakeskin handbag but queasy when it comes to forking above the big bucks for a Victorian snake ring?

Getting baubles is no more selfish, no much more heinous than acquiring clothing for you. In reality, it is considerably additional functional. Jewelry holds its worth! Stocks might soar and plummet, but a 1920s Cartier Art Deco diamond observe is generally well worth at minimum its fat in gold, and typically a entire lot a lot more. Moreover, can you don a bank statement wrapped all around your wrist for a evening out on the city?

Don Penny

If just about now you’re imagining, This Lynnie is a selfish minor baby, I would like to inform you that I am in simple fact in exalted business. Mae West, one of the maximum-paid out ladies in America in the 1930s, wrote in her autobiography, “With this form of income, I often fork out myself in jewels.” Marlene Dietrich once took a bunch of her more compact pieces—diamond earrings, diamond necklace, ruby bracelet, some other trifles—to Van Cleef & Arpels and had them put together into the amazing cuff bracelet that became her signature piece. (She can be noticed flaunting it in Alfred Hitchcock’s Phase Fright.)

Some collectors under no circumstances actually dress in their treasures. Immediately after Andy Warhol died, the executors of his estate have been surprised to find a stash of outstanding jewels, which includes a Boivin coronary heart bracelet that at the time belonged to Millicent Rogers, hidden involving two filing cupboards. Warhol clearly thought a whole lot about jewelry, after musing, “It would be extremely glamorous to be reincarnated as a big ring on Elizabeth Taylor’s finger.”

And no a lot less a personage than Marie Antoinette—I may perhaps abhor her politics, but I adore her taste in jewelry—got into the identical sort of difficulty I now do when she observed some thing she just had to have. It took her 6 years to pay back off a stunning pair of a few-strand diamond bracelets, and she was admonished by her own mother, who wrote: “The information from Paris tells me that you have just done a buy of bracelets for 250,000 livres, and to that result you have unsettled your finances.” (These identical bracelets marketed for extra than $8 million at Christie’s a number of months ago.)

So go in advance, unsettle your funds! Be part of me this Valentine’s Day in honoring that particular another person who has stuck with you via thick and thin, who has observed the disasters and the triumphs, and who is a lot more than worthy of that antique emerald parure you have been eyeing all yr extensive. Let’s jingle the stack of bracelets that just turned up on your credit card monthly bill and celebrate the most deserving man or woman in your daily life: you.

[On top illustration: Arman Sarkisyan earring ($13,750 for pair), bergdorfgoodman.com; Christina Alexiou ring ($6,315), musexmuse.com; Nikos Koulis earring ($12,240 for pair), bergdorfgoodman.com; Anthony Lent Rings ($3,800 each), anthonylent.com; Foundrae bracelet ($1,375), foundrae.com; Buddha Mama bracelet ($7,300), brokenenglishjewelry.com]