From Ahe Atoll, French Polynesia, dockside at a pearl farm. The shell is from the black lipped oyster that produces black Tahitian pearls. You can see the rainbow of colors at the fringe of the shell. These are the same colors lent to the pearls it creates, layer by layer.

Here's my setting for this Akoya strand. The sumo orange is aggressively imperfect with cinnamon sticks added as a buffer. Cinnamon was once worth more than gold by weight. The Portuguese, Dutch, and British fought wars over control of the trees in Ceylon. It sits now in every kitchen in the world.

The (lab-grown) diamond eye seems appropriate for something that has been quietly defying expectations for 40 million years. And the sea-green pearl it carries.

We love these Angela Cummings design stars and just got them into the floor display at the Nordstrom flagship store in New York city. We're always looking for celestial themes to showcase them. You see on the top star? The blue painter's tape sticking the star to the backdrop?

Silver reflects more so than any other metal with 95-99% light return. What looks like amber warmth glowing inside this piece is the silver faithfully reporting the color of everything around it. This Angela Cummings bangle is paying very close attention to the world outside.

There are four flowers in this image. Two were grown. Two others were carved from the lining of a shell and set with a lab diamond at the center. Two of these will be gone by the weekend.

On board a pearling ship in the Timor Sea off the coast of Western Australia with an impossible trove of South Sea pearls.

Brain coral grows approximately one centimeter per year. A specimen this size is likely decades old, possibly over a century.

Stars in the sky, shells underneath the sea.

Here's Pam at the pearl farm on Amakusa Island, Japan. The Japanese invented pearl farming. Kokichi Mikimoto produced the first hemispheric pearl in 1893. Tatsuhei Mise and Tokichi Nishikawa developed the modern round-pearl grafting method.

These two Akoya strands, one white and one silver-blue, thread up into the open, iridescent face of a black lipped Tahitian oyster shell. It looks like a ginkgo leaf.

The red star pendant cord isn't trying to disappear. It's a feature. Red is the color of fire, and blood, and ripening fruit, and is said to be the first color that humans created a word to describe.

Here is a strand of black Tahitian pearls with a pavé diamond clasp. The farmers on these French Polynesian atolls and islands collect similar shapes for strands like this. But the color is never unified. Not quite bronze, not quite green, and always changing depending on the angle of light.

Gold pearls come from the gold lipped oyster, usually from the Sulu Sea, the Philippines. There's no dye or tint. That's the color the oyster produces.

This is a heart-shaped lab grown diamond. Atomically, it's crystallized carbon, identical to a mined diamond. We like that we know the source (and the incredible price we can offer!). One provider set up a facility outside of Portland because of the availability of wind power from the grid there.

Sunflowers turn to naturally face the sun. The colorful mother of pearl heart inlay, cut from the inside of an oyster shell, grew layer by layer in ocean darkness. The chain isn't so wholesome: It's from National Chain in Warwick, RI (there's a big jewelry presence in RI dating unbroken to 1794).

The seahorse has no stomach. It must eat constantly to survive. For something so fragile, it has been a symbol of good luck at sea for as long as sailors symbolized the mythology of their oceanspanning voyages.

This one is a TreasureLock South Sea pearl with obvious padlock design antecedents. It is photographed on a crystal globe and you can see the gears and keys reflecting through the crystal. I used a small glob of orthodontic wax to stick the jewelry to the globe.

The five-pointed star doesn't exist in nature. No crystal grows that way, no flower, no living thing. It's a human invention.

Geometry isn't the opposite of nature, but the distillation of it.

The dots on the bracelet and the center of the anemone have the same visual task: a dark interruption in a field of light. The anemone has one of the darkest centers in the flower world, a black so dense it appears to absorb the magenta around it (and attracts those bees).

The Tahitian pearl farm again, the rickety footbridge to the atoll showing behind. Nice backflip, but notice the reef shark waiting?

Here is the Tahitian pearl farm on Ahe Atoll. It's so near the equator that the time of sunrise and sunset shift by just an hour in the course of the year. The working day always starts at 5:30 a.m. Lotsa coffee. They have a small black and white cat named Luna.

That's a paid model in a studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Remarkable talent! She comes out of hair and makeup and they're ready to shoot, and then she turns on the charisma like a switch. The strand is Australian South Sea from the largest oyster in the world.

Here is the warm blush of mother of pearl inset in a LoveLock heart pendant together with a conch. The conch builds out a shell spiral that corresponds with a mathematical ratio. That ratio repeats in nature: in galaxies, in hurricanes, in the chambers of the human heart.

Here's the dragonfly pendant heading out into the world . . .

The wings of the dragonfly are made of the same stuff as the pearls in the scallop shell. Oysters secrete nacre that lines the inside of their shell (mother of pearl). Fitting: a dragonfly spends most of its life underwater, as something else entirely, before it becomes what we recognize.

Different regions in the Pacific produce different color pearls for us, white, golden, black. French Polynesia is the source for black pearls. It is the most geographically isolated inhabited place on earth. The people who first arrived here navigated by stars, currents, and the behavior of birds.

Amethyst was once as precious as ruby or emerald. Then large deposits were discovered in Brazil. The price collapsed overnight. The stone never changed. And these lab grown diamonds are optically, structurally identical to mined stones, but a fraction of the price. You're paying for the mine.

Materials that have significance. Honey has been found intact in the tombs of ancient Egypt. Mother-of-pearl (the heart inlay) lines the inside of an oyster shell, laid down in microscopic layers so thin that light bends between them. The iridescence isn't a color. It's an interference pattern.