What Wearing Statement Jewelry Says About You (According to the Women Who Wear It)
I have been writing it down for years. Not on purpose at first. A line from an email here. A sentence Janet texted me or said to me in person, over the years of friendship that started with her first jewelry inquiry as a stranger who found me online. The words Victoria used in the contact form to describe pieces she loved but was unsure whether an available piece or a custom one was the best fit for her. After enough years, the lines started to rhyme.
The women who wear my work are not telling me the same story. Their lives are different. Their pieces are different. The reasons they came to me span everything from a wedding to a memorial to "I just don't want a plain band." But the line under the line — the thing they keep circling around — is the same.
So I want to do something I haven't done before. I want to set their words next to each other on a page and let them say the thing they have been telling me one at a time.
This is not a list of testimonials. It is closer to a conversation between women who do not know each other but who share a way of looking at jewelry, and at themselves. The piece itself is almost beside the point. What they are talking about is what wearing it lets them feel.
Here is what I think they are saying.
1. The midnight scroll
Autumn found me the way a lot of my favorite clients do — late at night, searching for something she couldn't find anywhere else. She was looking for jewelry to wear to her niece's beachside wedding. She had the dress. She had the colors in her head. She could not find the necklace. When she landed on my website she stopped scrolling, reached out through the inquiry form, and we were emailing each other into the night.
“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”
Janet's first piece came in a similar way. She saw a piece of mine on Facebook, reached out by email, and when I told her the necklace she had fallen for wasn't available to buy, she did something unusual. She asked if I could make her something similar but different. That email started a decade and fifteen-plus pieces.
“I haven’t bought jewelry from a retail outlet since I’ve known Andrea.””
The midnight scroll is the moment a particular kind of buyer recognizes herself. She has been looking, in chain stores and in the algorithm, for jewelry that already exists somewhere in her imagination. She has not found it, because the thing she is picturing is by definition not on a shelf with eleven copies behind it. When she finds the piece that matches the picture in her head, the recognition is immediate and physical.
Janet describes the physical part better than I can:
“First they feel cold against your skin. Then they warm to your body temperature.”
She is talking about the stones. She is also, I think, talking about the way a piece of jewelry stops being an accessory and starts being part of you.
2. "Pearls have just never been my favorite"
When Lisa came to me about wedding earrings, she said the line that names the whole pattern.
“Pearls have just never been my favorite.”
The conventional bridal earring is a pearl. The cultural expectation is that on the day she gets married, even a woman who never wears pearls puts on pearls because the day calls for them. Lisa was telling me she did not need the day to dress her. The day was already enough. What she needed was earrings that belonged to who she actually was when she walked down the aisle.
We designed drop earrings with white topaz, Herkimer diamonds, and rose quartz — clear stones that echoed her dress's beading, blush stones that pulled from her shoes and her wildflowers. The jewelry has to belong in the story, not compete with it.
Patricia came to me from the same place but for an entirely different occasion: she wanted a ring. Not an engagement ring. Not a wedding band. A ring. For her. She had been thinking about a plain gold band, and the more she thought about it the more she did not want one.
A plain gold band is something you can buy anywhere. Patricia wasn't looking for anywhere.
We made her a hand-carved, cast solid 14k gold architectural ring with angular faceted planes that catch light differently as her hand moves. The reason she had walked away from the plain band wasn't aesthetic. It was an identity claim. A plain band would have meant she wanted what every woman is supposed to want. The architectural ring meant she wanted what she actually wanted.
Lisa and Patricia were not telling me they have unusual taste. They were telling me they are not interchangeable. The women who come to me almost always have this quality of being unwilling to be a copy of anyone else. Sometimes they say so plainly. Sometimes I can hear it in what they refuse before I hear it in what they want.
3. The woman in the room with a story
Some of what the women who wear my work tell me is about being unmistakable in a room.
Loriann emailed me one day from work. She had worn a necklace she'd bought at a jewelry party, and a client walked in wearing the same exact one. Loriann's note to me named the contrast:
“No one gets to say that about your beauties! Your work blows minds!”
The pride in her email was not about exclusivity for its own sake. It was about a small daily armor against being misread — against the assumption that what she chose to put on her body could have been chosen by anyone.
Rachel, who is a photographer, put it this way:
“Wearing an Andrea Li necklace is what I do when I want a confidence boost. I become magnetic in them. The woman in the room with a story.”
I think about that phrase a lot. The woman in the room with a story. It is not the same as being the loudest. It is not even about being noticed by everyone. It is about being noticed by the right person — the one across the room who recognizes that the jewelry is doing something different and that the woman wearing it is, too.
Victoria's story tells this from the other side. When she first came to me, she said the words I would not have predicted: "I am not a jewelry person." She was looking for a necklace for her wedding. She had spent hours on Google with no luck. She stumbled on a statement piece on my website, fell in love with the design but not the colors, reached out through the inquiry form, and we talked. She bought the necklace. She bought the matching bracelet. She wore them to her wedding and could not stop showing them off. A few months later she came back for a custom commission in iolite and black opal — pieces she now refers to as the Victoria Collection.
“Andrea’s jewelry is going to turn me into a jewelry person because her pieces are just so enjoyable to wear.”
The woman who walks into a room with a piece on that belongs to her, only to her, and that she knew would belong to her the moment she saw it — that woman is not putting on a show. She is showing up as herself. The piece is the proof that she did.
4. "There was no deadline on the offer"
There is a thing that doesn't show up in a lot of jewelry buying. The maker stays — not as a seller circling back for the next sale, but as the person who made the piece and who wants it to fit, to last, and to feel like yours for years. Adjustments. Restringing. Check-ins. The work does not end when the box arrives.
Deb came to me as a cautious online buyer. She bought a piece — the Agate Roads necklace, layered with pearls, corals, labradorite, and complementary stones on gold-filled chain — sight-unseen apart from the photos. When it arrived, she loved it, but it didn't quite sit right on her petite frame. She told me. I told her she could send it back any time and I would adjust it. There was no time limit. There was no fine print. There was no rush.
In the years that followed, Deb cared for her mother through dementia, lost people she loved, came through her own health challenges. The necklace I'd shortened for her once has needed nothing else from me since. She has not commissioned more pieces. Life has rearranged her in ways that don't seem to ask jewelry of her right now. But she stays subscribed. She reads what I write. The piece sits in her drawer, ready when she is.
“I absolutely love it. I want everyone to know how talented you are.”
A piece of jewelry should fit the person who bought it, and if it doesn't, fixing it is part of my job.
Loretta found me six years ago. She is a co-founder of AFS, a company she has built with two partners over close to two decades. She emailed me asking if I could make three vintage rhinestone necklaces — one for each woman in the founding partnership — that would feel like each of them, individually, but also belong to a set. I made them. The next year she came back. Then the next. Aquamarine earrings one year. Vintage-component cocktail rings another. Baroque pearl earrings and sterling silver cufflinks last year.
She wrote to me before one of those annual commissions:
“The AFS ladies would love to adorn ourselves with another piece of beauty from your talented, creative mind and heart.”
If any year had been a miss, the tradition would have ended. It hasn't.
What Loretta and Deb are pointing at is a kind of trust that has very little to do with the object on day one. It is about who is on the other end of the relationship and whether she is still there a year later, two years later, six years later. The piece is part of it. The piece is not all of it.
A line from another client — Tamar, who came in years ago — has stayed with me:
“What really sold me on the piece was you. The storytelling, the depth woven into each piece.”
5. "We have never met officially, but I miss you."
A retired pharmacist in South Dakota named Judy started working with me in 2023. She had survived two open-heart surgeries. She had decided she wanted to collect jewelry that spoke to her. She did it the way she did most things — methodically, page by page through my site, writing down by hand thirteen pieces that were sold out, then commissioning each one in spirit, one at a time, over the course of three years. Twenty-plus pieces and counting.
One of those commissions was a Joan of Arc necklace. She wrote to me:
“Joan of Arc is my very favourite heroine from the past. Any chance you could custom that one for me or as close as possible?”
She did not give me design directives. She gave me the figure and her trust. When she received it she wrote back:
“There are no words to express how much I love the Joan of Arc. It is absolutely a masterpiece.”
She didn't ask for copies. She asked for pieces made in the same spirit, and she trusted me to interpret that.
And then, in one of her later notes, she wrote a line I think about more than almost any sentence anyone has ever written to me about jewelry:
“We have never met officially, but I miss you.”
I do not have a clean way to talk about that line. So I will leave it as it is. A woman in South Dakota who I have never been in a room with, who has bought twenty-plus pieces from me in three years, missing a person she has never met. The jewelry is the medium. The relationship is the thing.
Janet's collection runs the same way, the long way around. Fifteen to twenty pieces from me. A labradorite necklace built around her own stone. A "Mother's Love" memorial set in blue topaz — necklace, chandelier earrings, cuff — made after she lost her mother. Statement earrings in citrine, tiger eye, druzy, amethyst. Each piece marks a moment in a decade of her life.
This is what the collector identity actually looks like. It is not about acquiring. It is about marking.
6. "I wore it to a picnic."
There is one more thing the women who wear my work keep saying, and it is the thing I want to leave you with, because I hear it most often from women who haven't bought yet but want to.
They say: "I love it, but I don't have anywhere to wear it."
Then they tell me, when I ask, where they wore the last piece they bought from me. Jen Davis wore hers to a picnic in jeans. She wrote:
“I never thought I dressed well enough to wear her gorgeous creations, but she encouraged to find elevated casual.””
Her piece got her compliments at the picnic. She wore it again the next day. The "I don't have anywhere to wear it" turned out to be a story about permission, not occasion.
Jennifer wrote about her necklace:
“I’ve worn it out to dinner and running errands in jeans. Every time, I’ve gotten compliments from strangers.”
Janet, again, twelve years in:
“I haven’t bought jewelry from a retail outlet since I’ve known Andrea.”
The piece does not need a gala. It needs a Tuesday.
I have a longer essay coming about this — about the permission piece, about the women who say "I don't have anywhere to wear it" and what they actually mean. I am going to write it next month. For now I want to leave you with the thing the women themselves keep telling me: the occasion is not on your calendar. The occasion is that you saw something that made you feel something. That is enough.
The thing the words add up to
When I read the things the women who wear my work say, here is what I think they are saying.
The piece does not make the woman. It hands her the words she already had.
Janet always knew she did not want jewelry from a retail outlet. She just needed to find the maker who would build her the alternative. Lisa always knew pearls weren't her. She just needed to find a designer who would not try to talk her out of that. Victoria always knew she had strong visual taste, even if she had been calling herself "not a jewelry person." She just needed the right piece to undo the misnomer. Patricia always knew she didn't want a plain band. Deb always knew the relationship with the maker mattered to her more than the transaction. Loretta has always wanted to mark each year with a piece for herself and the women she has built her work with. Judy has always been a person who collects beauty the way other people collect anything else. Autumn knew exactly what she was looking for the moment she stopped scrolling.
My job at the bench is not to teach any of these women who they are. They already know. My job is to listen for what they are saying about themselves, and to make the object that lets them say it. I don't make pieces for galas. I make pieces for women who want to feel like themselves on a Tuesday.
If you are reading this and any of the lines above sounded like something you would have said — or have said, and didn't have a name for — that is the recognition moment. The one Autumn had at midnight. The one Janet had mid-scroll. The one Lisa had when she finally found a designer who heard the word *no* about pearls and didn't argue. The one Patricia had when she realized she was looking for a ring that wasn't on any shelf anywhere.
Welcome. I have been writing your words down for a long time.
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Where to go from here
Every one of the women in this essay has her own Studio Story. If a line above sounded like something you would have said, start with hers.
- Janet I Haven't Bought Jewelry from a Store Since
- Patricia's Ring Because a Plain Gold Band Was Never Going to Be Enough
- Lisa's Wedding Earrings When Pearls Just Aren't You
- Loretta's Tradition Six Years, Three Women, and a Standing Date on My Design Calendar
- Deb's Necklace What Happens After You Buy
- Judy's Collection The Woman Who Went Page by Page
- The Victoria Collection When a Wedding Guest Gets Her Own Collection
- Autumn's Beachside Wedding Set Found at Midnight, Worn at the Shore
The full archive lives at Studio Stories: Commissions and Studio Stories: Wedding.
If you would rather start a story of your own, the commission inquiry page is where most of these conversations begin. A piece, a stone, an idea. The email after the inquiry is how I get to know what you are actually trying to say.
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