The ring in the safe. A jeweller's confession.

I designed my engagement ring while I was in Italy.

Not because anyone asked me to. Not because I was engaged. I was a young jeweller on a restoration course, working in churches, restoring historic silverware, completely absorbed in metal and craft and the kind of beauty that outlasts everything around it. The design came to me the way designs sometimes do. Completely and all at once. I sketched it, kept it, and carried it with me for years.

When I eventually met the man I wanted to marry, I told him about the ring. Not as a hint. Just as part of who I was. He listened in the way he always listens, which is properly, and said nothing much about it.

Ten years into our marriage, he gave me my ring.

He had kept the design that entire time. Had it made. Presented it to me as though no time had passed at all. It is the most considered thing anyone has ever given me, and I say that as someone who has spent forty years thinking about what it means to make something for someone else.

The ring is extraordinary. It is also completely impractical for a working jeweller. It lives in the safe.

And I wear a tiny fine silver band that costs a fraction of what that ring represents and works for my actual life.

I am a jeweller who makes pieces specifically designed to be worn every day without thinking about them. And my most precious piece sits in a box in the dark.

I've thought about this a lot.

What we do to jewellery when we love it too much

There is a particular kind of reverence we reserve for the things that matter most to us. We protect them. We save them. We decide they are too important for ordinary days, ordinary moments and ordinary life.

And in doing so, we slowly drain them of the very thing that made them matter.

Jewellery kept in a safe is just metal and stones. Jewellery worn is something alive. It catches light. It gets touched. It picks up the small marks of a life being lived. It becomes part of the story of the person wearing it rather than a beautiful object waiting for a moment that never quite arrives.

The most precious thing about my ring is not the design I carried for years, or the decade my husband kept a piece of paper or the craft that went into making it. It's what it represents. And that doesn't require a safe. It just requires me to wear it.

I know this. I still put it in the safe.

We are all a little guilty of this.

There is no right occasion. There is just today.

The good earrings are not for special occasions. The necklace you love is not for when you've lost the weight, found the right outfit or feel ready to be noticed.

Wear it now. Wear it to the supermarket and the school run and the Tuesday afternoon that feels like every other Tuesday afternoon. Wear it because you made it to another day, and that is occasion enough.

Jewellery was never meant to be preserved. It was meant to be present.

The pieces I make at Porini are made in solid precious metals specifically because I want them to survive being worn. Every day. Without ceremony. Without a special occasion to justify them.

Not saved. Just worn.

A note on my ring

It still lives in the safe. I am working on this.

But I wear my silver band every single day, and it makes me happy every single day, and I think that is closer to the point than anything else I could tell you about jewellery.

Wear what makes you happy. Today. Not when the moment is right.

The moment is always right.

The pieces I make at Porini are designed to be worn, not saved. Every day, without ceremony, in the life you're actually living. Start here.

https://www.porinidesign.com/collections