March 2022
Sterling silver, lab-grown blue zircon

I fell in love with this pair of 10mm blue zircons the moment I saw them. Their color and clarity made me want to dive into them and swim around, so I had to have them. Not to be confused with cubic zirconium, zircon is a naturally-occurring gem that has been treasured since the middle ages. This pair of stones, however, is lab-grown zircon—chemically and structurally identical to the real thing, but far less expensive and with no flaws.

The stones are set in these cufflinks in an unusual five-prong setting, suspended in a silver cup that has been given a gray-black patina on the inside to make the limpid blues a little more mysterious.