Find Out Why Jewelry Is So Popular On Mothers Day

Jewelry’s Early Significance With Women

The art of adornment with jewelry is as ancient as humanity itself.

In the Paleolithic era, there’s evidence of pierced ivory beads. 

Egyptian tombs from 4400 BC have remnants of beads made of shells and other materials for the dead to take into the afterlife. 

At any time in history, if there are people, there is jewelry.

Emperors, kings, and pharaohs were among the first to wield jewelry’s power, but it was women that would become the centerpiece of jewelry’s influence.

Blame it on the first engagement ring ever given by Archduke Maximilian of Austria to Mary of Burgundy in 1477. Rumour has it that his clever counsel, not him, selected the gold and diamond ring out of good taste. 

Sound familiar?

Or how about the time in 1810 when Napoleon presented a 234 diamond necklace to Marie Louise right after producing his first heir, a son. His extravagant gift made history, becoming the very first “push present” ever recorded. 

Perhaps it was Queen Victoria as the original influencer - step aside Kardashians. Her serpent engagement ring from Prince Albert inspired legions of young brides-to-be to desire the same from their betrothed.

Even Queen Elizabeth wrote in a letter saying, “I do admire beautiful stones with all my heart. I can’t help thinking that most women do!” Her exclamation was in response to a collection of jewelry gifted to her by her friend Margaret Greville in 1942.

You couldn’t be more correct, Queen Mother. The historical instances of jewelry used in a grand gesture of love are evidence of that. 

Timeless Reasons For Adornment

It’s no secret that women are biased towards beautiful, shiny objects to adorn with - heck, I think that attraction is almost universal - but jewelry is so much more than that. 

Jewelry can be everyday talismans that carry your superstitions to empower daily living or remind you of personal truths. 

Jewelry can symbolize the steps you took throughout life’s journey to getting a degree, a new job, or becoming a mother. 

Jewelry is nostalgia, a collection of memories that you can carry with you that endures long after a significant life event. 

It’s no wonder that some of the world’s most famous mothers all had equally illustrious jewelry collections. Their stunning compilations reinforce the relationship between the lavish gift of jewelry and love, from engagement rings to statement pieces. 

Here are their stories.

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Lily Safra

Lily Safra has a long lineage of putting her power and influence to good work as a dedicated philanthropist while balancing motherhood. Cited by Forbes as one of the wealthiest women alive, she has a taste for the finer things in life, with a jewelry collection to prove it. Including many pieces by her favorite designer Joel Arthur Rosenthal, known to many as JAR. 

In May of 2012, Lily donated her private collection of 70 jewelry pieces to the "Jewels for Hope: The Collection of Mrs. Lily Safra" auction held by Christie’s in Geneva. 

Some of the more notable pieces include a tourmaline flower brooch with a 30-carat diamond entwined in the center made by JAR in 1982 that fetched $1.2 million. Another JAR creation, a ruby flower brooch containing pavé-set rubies totaling 173.09 carats, went for $4.3 million.

The crown jewel of the auction, however, was the Hope Ruby Ring. A 32-carat cushion-cut Burmese ruby flanked by baguette diamonds in a Chaumet ring sold for a whopping $6.7 million. The $35 million in proceeds went to 20 charitable organizations and earned Lily a standing ovation for her generosity. 

Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor is renowned for her fame as a Hollywood actress, her tumultuous love life, mother, and philanthropist. However, her famed jewelry collection, gifted to her throughout her many romances, made a significant historical impact when it sold for $156 million - the most expensive private collection of jewelry ever sold. 

Her on and off again love of her life, Richard Burton, is responsible for her collection’s most famous pieces. Including the La Peregrina, a 16th-century natural pearl, and a Bulgari emerald and diamond suite. The necklace features sixteen emeralds and has a detachable pendant to be worn as a brooch. Burton purchased the suite while they both were filming Cleopatra. 

Included in the Christie’s auction were the Van Cleef & Arpels Reine Marguerités suite, a daisy-themed necklace, earrings, and a brooch set. Taylor borrowed the necklace and earrings to accept the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for her work with AIDS awareness at the Oscars in 1992. After the event, she purchased both to commemorate the evening.

Jackie Onassis

Perhaps Jackie O’s transcendent presence in the White House as one of the most revered First Ladies in history laid the foundation of her legacy. Her dedication as a mother and her timeless style was pivotal in her endearment to the public. 

Despite her aristocratic background, she was most known for a triple strand of faux pearls designed by Kenneth Jay Lane. Although she favored costume jewelry, her collection also boasted many historical precious jewels gifted to her on her wedding day. Many of which were sold at the Magnificent Jewels auction at Christie’s in Geneva. 

One of the more luminary pieces in her esteemed collection was to commemorate the Apollo moonwalk. Ilias Lalaounis created orbit-shaped Apollo earrings commissioned by Aristotle Onassis as a birthday gift to Jackie. The gilded spheres were hammered and pitted, creating a lunar-like surface - a true embodiment of a significant moment in time.

Grace Kelly

Grace Kelly was one of the most beautiful style icons, a true gem of the silver screen and beyond. She was no ordinary mother as a princess with an eternal presence of, well, grace, just like her namesake. 

Her preference for pearls was legendary, but the gifts she received from Prince Rainer created their place in history equally. Including two engagement rings and a three-strand 64-carat diamond necklace that he gifted to her on their wedding day.

Her collection of jewels from Prince Rainer again illustrates a strong connection between love and jewelry. So much so that her love of Van Cleef Arpels jewelry indoctrinated the design house to be the official jeweler to the world’s most glamorous principality - creating an extravagant stream of pieces to keep the memories of her life and beauty alive.

Salimah Aga Khan

Princess Sallimah, born as Sarah Francis Croker Poole, has worn more fabulous hats than you could ever dream of in your lifetime. Let’s see, where to start? 

While schooling in the UK, she became a model and celebrity. Then, she married one of the world’s wealthiest men, Prince Karim Aga Khan IV, the Ismaili Muslims’ spiritual leader, and became ‘Your highness.’ Then, princess after her divorce, all while being a mother, an activist, and philanthropist. 

She also was an avid art and jewelry collector. She carried that passion throughout her many hats. Her affection for the finer things was further encouraged when she married Prince Karim Aga Khan, resulting in a spectacular jewelry collection.

Then, in 1995 Princess Sallimah decided to sell her entire collection, including custom pieces made for her by Van Cleef and Arpels, Boucheron, Cartier, and more. Khan contested her dramatic decision, but the courts ultimately ruled in her favor, and the jewelry was sold at Christie’s auction in Geneva. 

A couple of notable pieces was an impressive diamond necklace from Cartier with two 50-carat detachable tear-drop emeralds with five other cabochons totaling 170 carats. Another worth mentioning is an opulent statement necklace made of Burmese cabochon rubies whose main pendant piece could be worn as a brooch. The collection sold for what would be close to $50 million by today’s standards. 

Conclusion

So while most of these women are figures with lives that you only read about, say, in a blog post like this, they still share the fundamental truth - jewelry has incredible significance. Ultimately, most of these women leveraged their precious collections to create a legacy that ended up transcending the jewelry itself.

Yes, jewelry tells a story and is intimately personal, but its relevance goes beyond to continue humanity’s journey of imagination, fascination, celebration, and more. Perhaps it’s because you can find a small part of who you are contained within these tiny objects after all. 

Find the perfect gift for Mother’s Day or indulge a little yourself with my Ultimate gift guide. Download it today and discover a special treat inside.

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How to connect your Squarespace eCommerce website to the Pinterest Verified Merchant Program

How to Become a Verified Merchant on Pinterest with Squarespace in 2020 (Updated November 18, 2020).

Pinterest recently announced the opportunity for creators and sellers to become verified merchants on their site. As a verified merchant, your Pinterest account would display a checkmark within your profile page similar to Twitter’s verified badge. Additionally, your account would be able to post shoppable Pins to the platform. To read all about the benefits and requirements of the Pinterest Verified Merchant Program, click here.

I love the benefits I get from the Pinterest program, so I worked with my team to create this guide for myself and others, sharing how we were able to achieve Verified Merchant status on Pinterest using my Squarespace eCommerce website. (One quick note - at the time of this writing, you must be a US based merchant to become Verified.) Also I should give the standard disclaimer that although these steps are what worked or me and my team, there are a LOT of variables at play here and you follow this guide at your own risk! Incorrectly working with code can easily break your site severely, maybe even permanently. Ok, enough of that, let’s get moving!

in this post I will cover the following -

• Claiming your website

• Uploading your product catalog

• Installing your Pinterest Tag

• Adding the event code of ‘page view’

• Adding the event code ‘add to cart’

• Adding the event of ‘check out’

Let’s Get You Verified!

Step 1 - Claim your website

First, before attempting to integrate your Squarespace store onto Pinterest, you have to claim your website. See here for details.

Step 2 - Connect your product catalog to Pinterest.

By doing this, you will be telling Pinterest what you have available for sale, as well as a variety of metadata about the inventory. You will give Pinterest a URL to your store catalog, which is a CSV file that meets their product catalog requirements. To create a Pinterest product catalog the way I did, please use the awesome free service provided here, that will translate a Squarespace product catalog into a Pinterest product catalog:

* IMPORTANT* - Once you follow the instructions given by the above catalog converter tool, and download your converted product catalog, you must then upload and host it somewhere. Since Pinterest requires that the product catalog URL exist on the same domain as your e-commerce store, you will have to upload it to your Squarespace back end - thereby giving the catalog a web address matching your store’s domain.

Here is a video demonstrating how to upload and host a CSV file on your Squarespace site :

Step 3 - Install the Pinterest base code on every page of your website.

We need to make sure that when people visit ANY page on your website, we tell Pinterest about it, and give credit to your Pinterest account. That’s what the base code is for. Go to your Squarespace admin panel and go to Settings ->Advaced -> Code Injection. There, insert the following code snippet, AFTER any code that may already be inside that text area:

 <!-- Pinterest Pixel Base Code -->
 <script type="text/javascript">
   !function(e){if(!window.pintrk){window.pintrk=function(){window.pintrk.queue.push(
     Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments))};var
     n=window.pintrk;n.queue=[],n.version="3.0";var
     t=document.createElement("script");t.async=!0,t.src=e;var
     r=document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0];r.parentNode.insertBefore(t,r)}}("https://s.pinimg.com/ct/core.js");
   pintrk('load', '<YOUR PINTEREST ADD ACCOUNT ID HERE>');
   pintrk('page');
 </script>
 <noscript>
   <img height="1" width="1" style="display:none;" alt="" src="https://ct.pinterest.com/v3/?tid=YOUR_TAG_ID&event=init&noscript=1" />
 </noscript>
<!-- End Pinterest Pixel Base Code -->

*IMPORTANT* - In the above Javascript snippet, you must replace the part of the code that says <YOUR PINTEREST TAG HERE>, with the Pinterest ad account ID that is available in your Pinterest business account control panel.

Step 4 - Add Pinterest tracking event code for product viewed

Now that we have the base code installed on every page of our site, we need to fulfill Pinterest’s second requirement, which is to report a specific tracking event when your customers visit a product page.  In order to do that, we need to inject another Javascript snippet into Squarespace.  Since Squarespace does not afford us a unique place to inject Javascript into ONLY A PRODUCT PAGE, we can only inject Javascript into EVERY PAGE..  So, we will inject JS onto every page on your site, that will detect if the page is a product detail page, and if so, fire off the Pinterest “pageVisit” event code.  But first… In order to do that, we need to activate developer mode.

Step 4.1 - Activate developer mode on Squarespace

The first thing we need to do in order to unlock the full power of Squarespace is to go into developer mode.  By going this we can edit the site template and expose data that we want to access.  The tradeoff of turning on developer mode is that once you activate it, you won’t get template updates anymore.  For me this is a non-issue since I care much more about getting on the Pinterest Verified Merchant program, That, and I simply want an added level of power and control over my website as well.

It almost goes without saying but yes, in developer mode you have the potential to cause serious harm to your site.. but only if you do something foolish.  I promise for the purposes of this blog post, we are doing something simple.  For more info about developer mode please read the official documentation.  Now, if you want to supercharge your site and decide to take the next step, please go to your website and activate developer mode. When you’ve done it, read on! 

Step 4.2 - Edit the site template 

Once you have activated developer mode, you should get the credentials to login to an FTP server.  This server is where files are stored that define how your site works (the template).  You’ll need a decent FTP client program. There are many good free ones, I use Transmit for MacOS.  On your website, go to Settings->Advaced->Developer Mode.  There you will see the login credentials needed for FTP:

Using the username, password and SFTP information provided here, you’ll want to access to your site template, then edit the site.region file.  Before editing this file, make sure to save a backup of it.  (Again, the edit we are making is very simple, but you can’t be too careful.)  So, in site.region, you will insert a short code snippet into the <head> area of the page.  The snippet will expose information about a possible product that is being viewed on the site. This data will be accessed by Javascript from the Squarespace code injection panel. Here’s the code snippet to paste into site.region:

{.section order} 
<script>  
    var orderJson = {@|json-pretty};            
</script>


{.section website}
<script>  
    var siteJson = {@|json-pretty};         
    var myItem = {item|json-pretty};
</script>

And here’s what the snippet looks like pasted into the <head> area of site.region:

Save the new and improved site.region file back on your FTP server, then go back and reload your website (your normal store website) from a different browser or private window.   This is just to quickly test that you didn’t break anything when editing your site.region file. 

Step 4.3 - Add Pinterest tracking event code for “product viewed”

So after that short detour to turn on developer mode and edit the template, we can get back to our current task of calling the Pinterest “product viewed” tracking event whenever someone views a product on your site.  So go back to your site control panel and go to Settings->Advanced->Code Injection. Using the data we just exposed in your site template, we’re going to detect if we are on a product page and if so, call the tracking event.  Here’s the code snippet that gets pasted in at the end of your header code injection: 

<!-- Below is Custom Code for Determining if we are on a product page and calling Pinterest pintrk if so. -->
<script type="text/javascript">
    function getProductID(){      
      return myItem.variants[0].sku;
    }
    function addToCartClicked(){
      var id = getProductID();
        pintrk('track', 'addtocart', {
            line_items: [{ product_id: id }]
        });   
    }
    function isProductPage(){
      //Defined in the Template
      return (myItem != null);
    }
    document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function(){
        if(isProductPage()){
            var id = getProductID();
            pintrk('track', 'pagevisit', {
                line_items: [{ product_id: id }]
            });   
        }
        var elements = document.getElementsByClassName("sqs-add-to-cart-button");
        if(elements.length > 0){
            elements[0].onclick = function fun() {              
                addToCartClicked();
            }
        }
    });
</script>

Step 5 - Add Pinterest tracking event code for “add to cart”

We already added the Pinterest base code, and in the last step we reported when a product is viewed. Next we need to report when a product is added to the cart.  If you were paying attention in the last step, you saw that code was already included in that snippet.  There, we use JS to search for the add to cart button in the HTML document and add a click listener. That click listener then calls Pinterest’s pintrk function with the addToCart option, and includes the product ID from the data we exposed in our template edits.  So we’re good there, and on to the last step. (Disclaimer : I haven’t worked with too many Squarespace templates and can’t guarantee that the button class name is the same on every template and version. )

Step 6 - Add Pinterest tracking event code for “checkout”

The last step we will accomplish in order to satisfy Pinterest’s Merchant requirements is to report an event when a customer actually completes (converts) their purchase (YAY!). Thankfully, this is easy since Squarespace provides us with a way to inject JS code into the post-purchase page, called the thank you page.

• In your Squarespace control panel, again navigate to Settings->Advanced->Code Injection, and then scroll the left panel to (ORDER CONFIRMATION PAGE) and insert this code snippet :

<script>
var items = orderJSON.items;
for (var i = 0; i < items.length; i++) {
    var item = items[i];
    var line_item = {
        product_name: item.productName,
        product_id: item.sku,
        product_price: item.unitPrice.decimalValue,
        product_quantity: 1
    };
    pintrk('track', 'checkout', {
            value: {orderGrandTotal},
            order_quantity: 1,
            currency: 'USD',
            line_items: [line_item]
        },
        function(didInit, error) {
            if (!didInit) {
                console.log("pintrk error:", error);
            }
        });
}
</script>

You can see how we are using {orderGrandTotal} as part of the argument passed into the pintrk function. This is because the template provides some dynamic data in the form of Squarespace markup. That’s where the {orderGrandTotal} comes from.

Complete the Steps and Enjoy the Benefits

From here, you will need to have some sales convert on your site, at which point you should see everything working on Pinterest. Keep in mind that sales need to be coming in fairly constantly so that your site keeps reporting all these different events to Pinterest. If these events stop happening, Pinterest will assume your link is broken and you will get a bad tag “health” rating on the Pinterest dashboard. If you need to, you can create a $0.00 item on your site to test with by completing some sales yourself.

Remember to stay patient. Each step of the way is fairly complicated and this stuff isn’t easy! Also Pinterest can take some time to recognize certain things. For example, once you upload your product catalog, it can take a while for Pinterest to recognize the changes. 24 hours for sure. Similarly once sales start flowing through those pintrk calls, they aren’t recognized by Pinterest instantly. We found ourselves waiting 24-48 hours before seeing changed results on Pinterest sometimes, so don’t panic.

If you have any questions or comments please leave them below and we will do our best to respond if at all possible.

Becoming a verified merchant on the Pinterest platform is useful to increase the reach of your Squarespace eCommerce store. The blue checkmark on your account signals to other Pinterest users that you have been vetted by Pinterest as a trustworthy vendor. The steps provided here were the path that we took to become verified. Hopefully, this information will be of help to you and others looking to do the same.