The high jewellery pieces made from volcanic glass and black sand

Like many jewellery maisons, Boucheron often looks to the natural world for ideas, but it takes a creative director like Claire Choisne, who’s been at the Place Vendôme jewellers since 2011, to take a more unconventional approach to the theme. The source of inspiration for her latest high jewellery collection is water — an expansive and tricky subject to get a handle on.
“I already knew I wanted to do something that shows the beauty of water,” she says from Boucheron’s Paris HQ, “but I wanted it to be different.” Cue a ten-day research trip to Iceland in April 2022 to explore the barren, volcanic and icy landscape. “Maybe I should have chosen the Maldives or the Seychelles,” she jokes, “but it wasn’t the kind of water I wanted to represent. It was too cute, too blue and too sunny.”
The resulting 26-piece Or Bleu collection is characterised by chunky forms, a moody palette of predominantly black and white and Choisne’s customary incorporation of unusual materials. Top of her wish list to visit was Diamond Beach with its black volcanic sand and fragments of ice strewn along the shoreline. It inspired much of the collections monochrome colouring including the Black Beach necklace. “I loved the contrast between the shiny white ice and the black sand,” she says. “Of course I can mimic the water and ice with diamonds, but it was the black sand that was a challenge.” The solution was to use the real thing with Boucheron’s innovation team working out how to bind the sand with a polymer and spray it layer by layer to build up a 3D shape. The resulting torque necklace and earrings are a startling matt black with a velveteen texture.
More black, this time in the Eau d’Encre bracelet made from black obsidian, a form of natural volcanic glass. “You find it a lot in Iceland,” she says of the material that is also used in a set of rings, along with black and white veined marble (“the pattern looks like ice from the sky”), titanium and cloudy white jade. In a standout pair of shoulder brooches made to look like water cascading over shoulders, aluminium is coated in chromium to make the pieces light and extra shiny.
The house signature of using carved rock crystal in its creations found an easy fit in Or Bleu. In the Ice Cave bracelet it’s polished and shiny to mimic the country’s caves’ soaring interiors, while in the Iceberg necklace the rock crystal is matt and “frosted” with each piece of crystal carved to mimic a diamond, facets and all, but left unpolished as if the “diamonds” have been frozen.
In the Ondes set of two rings, and a statement necklace, Choisne wanted to emulate drops of water radiating out on the surface. “This piece took the most number of hours of anything we’ve made since I’ve been at Boucheron, more than 5,000 in total,” she says. A software package called Blender was used to mimic realistic water movement and patterns before the craftsmen carved the crystal and set diamonds underneath it. Both rings are designed to be worn together, “like rain falling on your hand”, she says.
Despite all this innovation, Boucheron’s heritage still informs the collection. In the Vague earring, inspiration has come from a tiara from the archive from 1910 based on Hokusai’s wave, while a cascading diamond Flots brooch was inspired by a comb from 1901. Perhaps the most conventional piece in the collection is the only one to use colour — the Or Bleu necklace — which is made from a set of hexagonal aquamarines that Choisne found at the Tucson Gem Fair in Arizona. “I started with the stones, when usually I would start with the design — these were just too amazing to turn down.”
But back to the Iceland trip. “It was really different and I loved it,” Choisne says. “It wasn’t easy — at times it was minus 20C outside — but I fell in love with it and all the powerful, strong variations of water that we saw.” Her collection of impactful and original jewels are certainly testament to that.boucheron.com