Eight is the number I keep coming back to. In the architecture I cannot stop staring at. In the spiritual texts I have been pulling off the shelf this year. In the simple fact that the symbol for infinity (∞) is just an eight turned on its side.
So I made a charm of it.
The Eighth Charm. A 2 carat round cut diamond set in a thick octagonal bezel, held by my signature claw prongs, finished with a wide diamond-set bale. Solid 14k yellow gold. Heavy. Big sparkle. Made by hand in NYC.
It is the first piece of a collection I have been building for a year.
The shape of the in-between
The octagon is the geometry that sits exactly between a square and a circle. The moment a square gives up its corners and starts becoming something else. A square is grounding. A circle is infinite. The octagon is the bridge.
That bridge is the whole point of the piece.
In architecture
Once you start seeing octagons, you cannot stop.
Almost every old baptistry in Italy is eight-sided. Florence's is the most famous. The reason is theological. In Christian tradition the 8th day is the day of resurrection, the day after the seventh, the day a person steps into a new life. So when builders had to design the room where someone would be reborn, they built an octagon. The geometry had to match the meaning.
The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, eight-sided.
Castel del Monte, the strange octagonal fortress Frederick II built in Puglia in the 13th century, every part of it obsessively eight, the floor plan, the eight towers, the rooms inside. No one fully knows why he built it that way and that is part of why it stays with me.
Mughal pavilions, octagonal. The pavilions where emperors went to be alone with their thoughts.
The pattern is consistent. When a space is meant to hold something sacred, when a moment is meant to transition, when a room is built for a moment of becoming, the architects choose eight sides. They have been making this call for a thousand years.
In spiritual traditions
The book on my nightstand is still You Are What You Hate, the dense Kabbalah text I have been working through in pieces. The number 8 keeps surfacing in it.
In Hebrew thought, seven is the number of the natural world, the seven days of creation, the cosmos as it is. Eight is what comes after. The miraculous.
In feng shui, the bagua mirror, an eight-sided talisman people hang at the threshold of a home, is built to deflect bad energy and hold space for what is good. Sacred geometry doing protective work.
In numerology, eight is balance, abundance, infinity. The number that keeps cycling without ending.
It would be hard to find a tradition that does not consider eight a powerful number.
The talisman
I made the Eighth Charm because I wanted a piece that did this work. Not a piece I JUST liked the look of. A piece with intention.
Octagonal bezel, thick gold, claw prongs the way I always set them. The diamond is round, 2 carats, DE color, sitting at the center of all that geometry. The bale is wide and diamond-set, sized to slide onto whatever chain you already wear (it fits anything up to 4mm). Sold without a chain, on purpose. The point is not to start over. The point is to add this to the rotation.
A talisman, but the wearable kind. The kind you NEVER take off.
How to wear it
Layer it onto a thin chain you already love. (Thin chain, heavy charm, the proportion thread you have heard me on lately, still alive.) Slide it next to a charm that already means something to you, your grandmother's locket, the cross your mom gave you, the gold pendant from a trip you cannot stop remembering. The Eighth doesn't need to be the loudest piece in the rotation. It just needs to be there.
Worn close. Working in your favor. Keeping everything else at the door.
If you want first look at what's next
The Eighth Charm is the first piece in this collection. There are more on the bench. The newsletter is where they will land first, sketches, studio photos, the chance to claim a piece before it hits Instagram.
If you want first look, the newsletter list is where to be.
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