The Hidden Gem Podcast – Episode #1 with Helen Molesworth: On why gems and jewels touch every level of humanity

Helen Molesworth: When we look at gems and we look at jewels, we are studying a subject that touches on more levels of humanity than any other subject in the world. We have chemistry, physics, geology, finance, the art history of the jewels they’re mounted in, the design and the creativity of how they’re made in the first place, the human stories of the people that wear them, the exciting world record prices that make millions a carat, all these extraordinary stories. Build up a very big picture that no other subject in the world covers in its entirety.

Show Opener: SSEF presents the Hidden Gem Podcast, conversations with the world’s leading people behind the journey of gems and jewels from the source to the finished piece.

Laurent Cartier: Welcome to Hidden Gems, a podcast by SSEF, exploring the history, culture, science, and human stories behind gemstones. I’m Laurent Cartier, and today I’m speaking with Helen Molesworth, jewellery historian, gemologist, and author of the book „Precious“. We met at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London during the 2025 blockbuster Cartier exhibition, which she curated. So you may even hear the hum of the museum around us. We talk about why gems and jewels have always stirred something deeply human, the thrill of discovery, the instinct to collect, and the desire to transform beauty into meaning. From geology to finance, from power to romance, we explore why gemstones and jewellery sit at the crossroads of science, history, art, and emotion.

Laurent Cartier: Well, Helen, great to be here. We’re at the V&A, the Victoria Albert Museum in London. Thank you so much for welcoming me here. You’re a jewellery historian and a gemmologist whose career spanned what, 25 years? Sotheby’s, Christie’s to setting up the Gübelin Academy. And you’re now senior curator of jewellry at the V& A and lead curator of the museum’s blockbuster Cartier exhibition here. An author of the book Precious, which came out in 2024 and was published by Penguin. Wow, what a biography.

Helen Molesworth: Thank you, Laurent, that’s very kind.

Laurent: The first question I’d have for you is I read that you broke your leg at age six, climbing up a wall to get an amethyst geode. Now most six-year-olds would have been cured of rock hunting forever. What made you even more obsessed?

Helen: I think, well firstly can I say it’s gorgeous to be with you here today so thank you so much for coming to the V&A for us to chat. I think that early story was really seminal in my life decisions. The first was, the first part of it was before the breaking of the leg what happened was my godfather showed me this amazing jewel. It was an this geode which he put into my little hands at the age of six. And I remember thinking that he had just placed a new universe in front of me and I had access to this magical world of sparkling purple crystals and it was very clear to him, I think, that I wasn’t going to let go of it so he took it and thought he had hid it from me by hiding it on top of a dry stone wall. And I remember thinking, I’m not having this, and I waited for him to leave, and climbed up the wall and pulled the whole wall down on top of myself, breaking the leg, looking for the geode. And the second part of the story is that it was this first, you know, excitement of seeing this amazing jewel, this gem. But the second part was the discovery and then the chase. And I think many of us in the gem world were always on the hunt for the excitement of something new. And I remember thinking when I broke my leg, okay, I’ve broken my leg but I didn’t get to keep the amethyst geode. And I’ve been on the hunt for gems ever since.

Laurent: Lovely and another thing that struck me is that you cheerfully described your work as all things bling. Now it’s a word that most people use dismissively or rather dismissively so are you trying to reclaim it or is there something genuinely subversive about being serious about sparkly things? What is your relationship to that word bling?

Helen: I love that. You couldn’t be more right. That is exactly what this is. I am trying to reclaim everything jewellery for everybody because one of the biggest difficulties we have in jewellery and gemstones is that people think it’s an elite and very inaccessible part of… From my perspective now at the V&A, art history, from many other people’s perspectives, financial gain. So, the difficulty is you have something that people think is inaccessible. You’ve got two options. You either dumb it down completely and make it accessible at the lowest level or you open up to everybody and you add some humor and I think this is so important for jewellery. Bling is attractive. It’s what makes people think of celebrities and the glamorous side. There’s nothing wrong with using that as the hook to get people in. But once you’ve got people attracted to that level of jewellery from a more light-hearted perspective, when we look at gems and we look at jewels, we are studying a subject that touches on more levels of humanity than any other subject in the world, in my opinion. If you think about gemstones, we have chemistry, physics, geology, finance, the art history of the jewels they’re mounted in, the design and the creativity of how they’re made in the first place, the human stories of the people that wear them, the exciting world record prices that make millions a carat. All these extraordinary stories build up a very big picture that no other subject in the world covers in its entirety. I mean mentioned sort of the fashion, the popularity of all the different design elements but also how that changes, how it tells us about trade routes, it tells us about social shifts, you can look at the history of gems and the history of jewellery and learn about entire cultures and the whole of humanity over thousands of years. That’s partly what I write about in Precious but I think if you attract people by talking about bling you can see that there is a great attraction in that fun level but there is super-depth below. It’s like the gems forming themselves, they’re beautiful on the surface but they’ve formed very deep down.

Laurent: And then why did you call your book Precious then and not Bling? What is the difference between Bling and Precious?

Helen: I actually really liked the idea of calling it bling but you know with any project it’s sort of a teamwork and I worked very closely with the publishers. And the idea was that it was something that had the depth to it, and it really has so many different levels. The word precious, it can be emotionally precious as well as financially precious. And I think that’s really what attracts us so much to Gems is the human stories. It’s a bit like you doing the podcasts. You want to hear from the people because we’re the ones that at the ultimate level have created and wear and buy and sell these jewels.

Laurent: So can you tell me a little bit more about how this concept of precious has evolved through time? I mean, since ancient times, humans have been collecting stones, gemstones, jewellery. Does precious have a different connotation in different cultures, in different geographies, in different times?

Helen: I think it does, actually. I think that’s very true. I think we see through gems how our approach towards value has shifted and our cultures have changed and how we have evolved. I would start by saying probably the most, the first thing that springs to my mind, imagine that first person that ever found a gemstone. There was a shining pebble on the side of a river, an alluvial deposit, and somebody picks up a brightly colored shining gem. What must that have felt like in an early culture? It must have been like a gift from the gods, or the first person that opened an oyster looking for food and discovers a pearl. You know, in Latin, unio, this unique thing, because you can’t understand where it’s come from. It’s like a virgin birth. Pearls are a great example of how we see the approach to value and how we have changed our approach to gems over history. If you look at them in very early sort of biblical times, they’re obviously to do with, you know, very important purity and value. So there’s to do with this concept of preciousness being the rarity, the ownership of kings, the pearly gates of heaven. So they’re associated with religion very early on. We see this in gems. Early cultures, religion’s a form of governance, it’s an important part of our culture. It’s only now we’ve become secular in the last few hundred years in major cultures. You look at gemstones with their religious value and how those have been used as a way of associating with our belief systems. By the mediaeval period, gems start to become curative. So you see how humanity has gone from belief in a god to belief in science. So we start to look at gems by the 12th, even earlier, but you know, middle ages.

Laurent: So Hildegard von Bingen

Helen: Exactly, exactly. We’ve got the early lapidaries too. You know you’ve got Theophrastus, you’ve got plenty writing about gems but they’re not necessarily talking about the curative properties. It’s Hildegard and sort of the mediaeval lapidary who start to look at it from the curative property. And then just to sort of tie this up from the big picture, by the time we get to the 19th century especially in Britain, gems start to become romanticised. And we have people like Queen Victoria being given them by Prince Albert as love gifts and you start to see this association of the romantic sort of really emotional value of gems. So I think gems give us a big picture of human evolution and that’s their value, their preciousness. It’s changed from financial, religious, curative all the way through to romantic.

Laurent: So what’s left in terms of symbols?

Helen: Goodness, that’s an interesting one. What’s going to come next for gems? Well, people have tried doing the blockchain. We’ve looked at the more technological usages of gemstones. I guess that’s the excitement. We’ll just wait and see. It’s the next discovery, right?

Laurent: Yeah and in some form I sometimes think that there may also be a like back to the roots. I see that in as the a lot more people are interested in minerals now and being you know looking going looking for rocks going to nature. Maybe there is this technological side but at the same time gems somehow encapsulate a connection to nature or a connection to where we come from.

Helen: I think that’s true because they’re physically a connection to the Earth, but at the same time they are emotionally grounding. And I think this is something I haven’t said that’s the most obvious thing of all. Our attraction to gems is their beauty. And it’s that very first moment I had when I was little, when I’m sick. That moment you see something beautiful, you just feel better. It lifts your heart, it lifts your spirits It makes you feel that the world is a larger place but you’re focusing on something tiny and beautiful and I think there’s that moment of wonder where it connects us to everything around us. I love this idea of what you said that it’s grounding and it maybe it will come back to that again. I think you’re right.

Laurent: Well I mean when I talk to people who have absolutely no interest in gems or jewels and you show them some stones there is that moment of wow you know if you have this very strong saturation of color or you have so much kind of concentrated in one small object there’s few people who can not react to that and what’s interesting also is to see how different people have kind of different affinities so why do you think that some people are attracted to certain gems and not others?

Helen: I think we have an innate attraction to certain colors, depending on our personality, so of course one of the wonderful things with colored gems is that we have that variety. I was going to say the other thing with gems is obviously the interaction with light. Light is one of our founding needs of humanity. Go to every major religious text and it’s the beginning. You have a festival of light with Diwali, you have the beginning of Genesis with light being the beginning of creation. The way light interacts with gems is going to make us feel that we are at our most, I think, combination of our most fragile, the beginning our lives, but at the same time the greatest and most powerful. It’s almost a religious experience. So I think the attraction for gems is light. I think that the difference is that people… The differences people feel towards different gems is certainly the color. You can look at it scientifically and say Americans like a different cut of diamonds from Europeans. I think that’s one of the first things we were potentially erroneously taught in our early diamond studies. But people interact culturally in different ways, to different gemstones. So a very good example is jade. It’s something that has taken me decades to learn enough about as a European, because I didn’t grow up in Asia, but I spent eight years working in Hong Kong and China and learnt to understand and appreciate a gemstone that for thousands of years has been in the culture of the people. And in some cases like jade, gemstones are actually part of your upbringing, they’re part of the meaning of what it is to be a good human being. And I think with globalisation and our understanding of the world becoming more easy with the internet and all kinds of connections, we’re starting to assimilate all those different ideas across the world. So those cultural changes are becoming slighter and we’re getting access to greater learning so we can appreciate gems in an easier way.

Laurent: And we’re finding new ways to consume them, right? There’s perhaps less rituals, less baptisms, less initiations, less things like that. But there’s other opportunities for people to purchase or to self-purchase jewellery or gemstones or men wearing jewellery or women buying jewellery or gems for themselves. It’s interesting to see how that evolves also through time.

Helen: Yes, I think they’ve become more accessible and our use of them has become more fluid. And like I said, we’ve got so many different ways in which we use jewellery too. You know, you think about people who believe in the crystal powers of gems, people who use them as a store of wealth, people use them because they are love gifts, people who use them because they symbolize a certain style that they want to put forward to the world in what they’re wearing. You’ve got all these different purposes behind why people buy gems. And it’s becoming more fluid the more we learn about them. I mean, you’re a great educator, I’ve spent years in education. It’s becoming easier to learn now because everything is so much more accessible.

Laurent: And what about synthetic gems or synthetic diamonds, which are everywhere now? It’s actually nothing new. Artificial gems and gem treatments have been around since the ancient times. How is the human’s link to treated material or artificial material kind of evolved? Do you have any insights on that?

Helen: Yeah it’s a great question and obviously it’s one that we talk about a lot at the moment with synthetic diamonds being so sort of so earth-shifting in the market. As a historian, it’s not something that is surprising me at all as you say it’s something that we have mastered in certain gemstones for hundreds of years. If you look at the shift in the market today with diamonds we only need to look a hundred years ago to what happened with synthetic rubies and culturing pearls. Where these were the two most valuable gemstones on the planet and after they could be replicated to a certain extent both markets crashed. Today they’re both the most valuable gemstones again on the planet. I’m not saying that’s what will happen with diamonds, there are different sort of different elements at play. But it’s part of our human nature to want to create, to want to replicate, to make things better. Going even further back, you mentioned earlier examples. We’ve got texts from Pliny talking about how to crackle quartz and dye it green to turn it into fake emeralds. We got an amazing necklace here in the V&A that for many years was catalogued as a Roman emerald necklace. It’s from the first century, small green hexagonal beads. It’s variscite. The Romans were cutting another green gem material that clearly wasn’t prismatic hexagonals crystals into what they wanted to look like emerald crystals. So we were faking these jewels 2000 years ago already, very purposefully. I think it’s part of human nature to want to make something that looks like something that’s valuable. But what we have to understand is the value is actually in that brilliant technological advancement of humanity. And one of the things I love seeing with synthetic diamonds is it’s just another sign of what we as people have achieved. The fact that we can create synthetic diamonds, which we thought we couldn’t do ever, you know. In 1950s General Electric managed to create a few… CVD, a few HPHT diamonds, but the idea that we can now create CVD at this level, it’s a great technological breakthrough. We should be proud that we’ve managed to do this.

Laurent: And same with pearls, because people had tried for centuries and centuries and centuries to cultivate pearls and we had to wait until the early 20th century to get there.

Helen: Absolutely.

Laurent: This is very interesting but also coming back to pearls I mean in Roman times there were many experiments to create artificial pearls certain people were not allowed to buy pearls because there was so much demand and so little supply. Leonardo da Vinci was also had his recipe for imitating pearls so it’s interesting I think there’s two sides to that call one is that people are perhaps doing it fraudulently and the other is to in some ways make these materials more accessible. It’s like not everybody has the funds to buy a five carat no heat ruby so by treating it that’s it as long as it’s correctly disclosed you’re also making it more accessible to a wider audience.

Helen: Absolutely. I mean the culturing pearls is a great example where we talk about the democratization of jewellery and women wearing jewellery more freely in the 1920s. One of the reasons that you could wear, as Coco Chanel put it, ropes and ropes of pearls because they were cultured and you could suddenly get them. You didn’t have to be a millionaire’s wife at the time to be able to wear them, although it is interesting to note that she wore actually natural pearls and didn’t tell anybody because she wanted to wear the natural pearls while she was telling everybody that you should wear pearls you can get your hands on.

Laurent: And she probably also wore some imitation pearls.

Helen: I’m sure she did too. I mean there are even stories that Elizabeth the Great, Elizabeth the First, we see her sort of covered in pearls in all these great 16th century portraits. There are stories that some of those pearls are beads with fish scales on them, whether that’s true or not is another story, but it tells you how we understand that these gems have become more accessible historically.

Laurent: Why do you think she would have done that?

Helen: So that she could have as many as possible. And also it’s a bit, I mean, it’s a bit like, I wonder if synthetic diamonds will go this way, how less intrinsically valuable, i.e. cultured or synthetic gems, could be used as part of propaganda and showing yourself to the world. It becomes more of a costume, in a way. I don’t want to say costume jewellery because I’m not degrading the use of the materials. Costume itself is how you present yourself. You look at these great Elizabethan portraits. It doesn’t matter if they’re real pearls or not. What they’re saying is, I’m in charge of the seas. This is a marine valuable item. I am the head of the Armada. And look at me as the leader of Britain and the whole of Europe when I’m beating the Spanish. That’s what her portraits are saying when she’s wearing pearls. Everyone’s going to assume they’re real. Just wear as many as possible.

Laurent: So jewels and gems are stories.

Helen: They are stories.

Laurent: Well, I came to the right place then.

Helen: Talking of stories, I’ve been dying to ask you if I may, how did you get into gems and what’s your first love, your first feeling when you had that early interaction?

Laurent: I think there’s kind of several angles to it, but one of the first reasons was that I met Henry Hänni, who was a professor of mine at university, and he showed all these pictures of mining regions and travels and had stories to tell. And I realized coming out of geology that that is really something that I loved about gemology is there’s, as you said before, there’s history, there is finance, there psychology, there’s… There’s symbolism, there’s history, there is cutting-edge science, there is biology, there’s physics, there’s earth sciences. It’s a mix of what being a human or living on this planet is in a way.

Helen: I love that.

Laurent: And it would probably be the same with wine or with something else, or fashion could also have that. But somehow, for me, it was gemstones and there’s so much still to discover. So it’s really this curiosity, you know. I’ve had many years where I’ve worked on pearls and other things and it just never gets boring.

Helen: You never know what’s coming next, right? From the jewellery and the gem perspective, you never know which piece of jewellery someone might show you in a jewellery box. You never what you might find in a safe. But with gems, you never what’s gonna come out of the earth next. In our life alone, how many new discoveries have we seen? We’ve seen new deposits of spinel. We’ve see new species of garnets. We’ve seen whole areas in Africa start to be developed. I just find it so exciting. I think you’re an adventurer too by nature, aren’t you?

Laurent: Well, yeah, I quite like traveling to gem-producing regions, and that will be my next question. You visited some interesting mining regions. What has field work taught you as a curator that books couldn’t?

Helen: Books can’t teach you a lot of things because they are a singular interaction from your own side with the intellectual. Fieldwork takes you to the people. And I think by going out to the places where the gems come from originally, I was trying to connect with those local communities. I’ve always wanted to know where the gems come from intellectually, and academically it’s important to understand the process and how gems get to us, where they come from, the geology of the formation which you need to see in situ, and perhaps the newest discoveries that are happening to be at the edge of the information we need in our industry. But the real reason is that I wanted to understand the people that were working with these gems. I feel that bling, going back to the bling question, we can sometimes make it very light-hearted and jewellery and gems can be this one-sided high-value elitist subject. You look at a world record sapphire in an auction and not enough people think who mined that? Where did that come from? What processes had to happen for that to get to us today? For it to be $15 million.

Laurent: So what does bling or precious look like in a mine in Sri Lanka or in Mogok in Burma?

Helen: Like nothing you could ever imagine because it looks like mud and dirt and sweat and hard work because that’s what it is. But it also looks like passion and pride and people that have had generations behind them working really hard for something they believe in. I had some really seminal experiences in Sri Lanka where I go back every year now, so I’ll be going back in January and I’ve been for many years and I go to the same mines where I see the same families but also the same region that they were mining sapphires 2000 years ago. So historically it’s very important to understand how the landscapes change and how the earth is still in some places sustainably giving us gems over a long period of history if those countries are managed well. Sri Lanka is a great example of sustainable mining, small-scale artisanal mining, where they want the families to continue to operate. And I go to these mines, they’re just small shaft mines in paddy fields by the rivers. You go 30 feet down and you hit the gravels where the sapphires have settled in the old riverbeds. The miners are working with quite basic conditions, but I can remember three or four years ago going down one of these mines and meeting a mine manager I’d seen several times. And we were stuck waiting for something to happen and just chatting and I said look I come every year What can I bring you and he said I said, you know, I don’t want to bring you cigarettes I can’t bring you chocolate. It’s gonna melt. What can bring you he said just bring me more people: I want people to see what we do. We’re proud of our work and that was actually one of the reasons I wrote Precious because I want everybody in the world to understand how we end up with these beautiful objects. They don’t come out of nowhere, they come out out of hard work and pride.

Laurent: Well, well said. And for the Cartier exhibition that’s currently on at the V&A, you had to choose 350 objects. How do you go about choosing these objects? And how do you put together an exhibition for an audience that has an ever shorter attention span?

Helen: That is a brilliant question. Quite the challenge, no? It is. Luckily, I have a short attention span because I like things that are sparkly and beautiful, so I get easily distracted, a bit like a magpie. So I do find that premise quite easy to start with. The challenge in putting together an exhibition of 350 beautiful objects is firstly where to start and secondly how to cut it down to just 350 because when you look at the history of jewels produced by Cartier there are so many amazing jewels to start with so I will be blunt I had a top 10 top 20 absolute highlights from Cartier’s production that we had to get in the exhibition and I had that as serious points where these are the best jewels they’ve to be in there, because you want people to see the best of the best. The other side though is you want to tell a story. So I wanted to tell a story of creativity, craftsmanship and legacy. That was the three pillars because they’re things that the V&A believes in. But also, and this is the trick in creating a narrative for a museum, you have to have very clear messages and sound bites. And you tell small, little stories at a time, but give people the opportunity to delve deeper, if that’s the way they’re inclined. And I think the key to a good exhibition is you could walk to one piece of jewellery straight away see that and you could walk out of the exhibition again and be happy because that one story taught you something or showed you something beautiful but if you want to spend three hours in there and learn the whole story and see how it’s pieced together great so it’s a bit like I remember putting Academy together putting together the teaching for colored gemstones we would have people come to the classes who might be third generation big diamond dealers. They might have just started out on a journey of being interested in gems. One guy was a pilot, one person was a lady married somebody rich, you’ve got to attract everybody at different levels. Gems have something for everyone. I swear. I still think that’s the only history subject in the world that does. Gems and jewels have something for everybody and that’s how we put together the exhibition

Laurent: Beautiful. So the exhibition is running until November 2025?

Helen: Middle of November, November the 15th, the great news is it’s been sold out.

Laurent: But there is a book.

Helen: There is a book and the book has sold 40,000 copies and made the Sunday Times bestsellers list twice. So the Cartier book published by the V&A, it’s beautiful, it has some wonderful images and I’ve written a chapter actually called An Obsession with Gems. So this was what Louis Cartier said about gems to his salesman in 1922. He said to them, you must make the client obsessed with gems and I remember thinking that’s how I want people to feel when they come to this exhibition. I want them to feel obsessed with gems. I have been obsessed with gems as long I can remember and I think that everybody has something they can find in gems they will find a hook into.

Laurent: Because that’s the trouble of gemologists sometimes, is that we’re so focused on the gemstones that we kind of forget the jewellery piece. When we look at the gallery space that you have here at the V&A, are there pieces that you look at, you look at the whole piece, or you’re more interested in the gem, or how do you kind of navigate?

Helen: Well I think this is a really important point and I think it’s where I’ve been very lucky to find a niche in my career particularly. I was always interested in science. I came into it as a jewellery historian and art historian initially and then studied gemology. That became the big thing for the following ten years and then I’ve come back to jewellery. One of the things that’s so clear in our industry and slightly frustrating is you have scientific earth science gemologists and you have jewellery historians and never the twain shall meet. It often feels as if we are two different species of people. You’re one of these great people that I know I can talk gems and jewellery with together and I do feel like we have a responsibility to sort of bring those worlds to collide and to meet again. I have jewels in the gallery that no one’s ever looked at from a gemological perspective and have discovered immense meaning behind the gems in medieval and Renaissance jewels because jewellery historians didn’t realize that those gems were selected for specific purposes. On the other side, I have gems that I look at, that they have great gemological purpose, but the mounting, because they’ve been looked at because they’re a blue diamond, the mounting is incredibly important and it tells us something about the history of how that was made. It’s where gems and jewels meet that the magic happens, in my opinion.

Laurent: Well put. Well put and jewellery and gemstones aren’t just beautiful to kind of follow up on that. They can be links to world history and you’ve got a few pieces here in the gallery and probably also in the in the Cartier exhibition. Can you share an example of that?

Helen: I think I might talk about my favorite jewel in the Cartier exhibition, which is the Williamson diamond brooch, because this is an example of exactly where an important gemstone gets made into an important jewel and together they create something spectacularly important historically. So the Williamson diamond was discovered in Tanzania, Tanganyika at the time, was a 56 carat rough pink, I think. And in 1947, the owner of the mine, Tom Williamson, gave it to Princess Elizabeth as an engagement gift when she got engaged to Prince Philip, so this was the future Queen of England. It was then cut in London to a 23 carat pink diamond, one of the most perfect pinks I’ve ever seen because the cut itself is this beautiful round transitional 30s 40s style cut pink non-modified, beautiful cut of a diamond and it was mounted by Cartier in 1953 in a flower brooch. 1953 was the year of the coronation of the Queen. We now have a diamond and a jewel that we have the entire history for that was given at the engagement of a future Queen of England, made into a jewel the year of her coronation, worn to the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana, and has become one of the most important gems in the Royal Collection. Even more wonderful, we have found in the archives here in the V&A, a whole selection of drawings that were made by Frederick Mew, the designer at Cartier, of different iterations of the brooch, which have never been seen before. So we even see the creative process of different ways in which the diamond could be mounted, one with a circle around it that says, Her Majesty the Queen approved.

Laurent: So she commissioned the piece, or she commissioned Cartier?

Helen: We don’t know whether she commissioned it per se but she certainly was shown the drawings and chose the final example. Now that is a great example of a piece of British history and when you look at that within the perspective of the sort of the personality of these great people, together with their choices, their involvement in creativity. Cartier at this point was a British business, so the British royal family was supporting Cartier as a British industry, as part of British jewellery industry. But also it’s that personal element that she was involved at that level. So she had a choice. She emotionally preferred one brooch and that’s the one we see today. She loved it, we know that from the drawings and from the time she wore it. So jewellery tells us a lot about historic moments.

Laurent: What does the piece or the design itself express, because we talked about Elizabeth the first before, what do you see in that piece?

Helen: It’s very interesting because in one book, only one, but somebody we trust, Nadelhofer, who wrote about Cartier, he calls it an Edelweiss. Which, coming from Switzerland, as you too as well, I’m sure appreciate immensely, we don’t know why if that was the inspiration. There seem to be other flower drawings, one looks like a chrysanthemum. I think he was using different flower images, but one of the things it does tell us is that in the 1950s naturalism in jewellery was a really important style. That sounds like people just like flowers. We can dumb it down if we like. Flowers are beautiful, nature’s a sort of thing that makes us all very happy. But actually, historically, think of what was happening post-war. The country’s gone through the hardest time in modern history. Going back to nature goes back to what we said it grounds us, it creates this sense of escapism and relief because it’s natural and beautiful and joyous and this reason that we see so many flower jewels in the 1940s and 50s is because it is a post-war escapism. When you realize that’s the emotional reason behind this particular period of jewellery history Suddenly for me, I find that very emotive very touching It’s not just that they’re pretty, it’s because a whole society has gone through massive, difficult changes. And jewellery is alleviating that and bringing us joy again.

Laurent: And a new birth, a new blossoming it is. …And then with her coronation…

Helen: I love that. It’s a bit like emeralds, it’s a new birth, it is a new sign of growth and life and a renewal. I love it. Well said.

Laurent: Why do you think, I mean we already touched upon this before, but why do you think humans have been collecting stones, gems and jewellery since ancient times? Why do we do it? We don’t need them, we don’t eat them. Why is there this urge to do that? And do you think that passion will continue in future?

Helen: I’ll answer the second part first because it’s the easiest. Yes, certainly, without a shadow of a doubt. The first part, I cannot answer this. I ask myself this all the time. I think anybody who has collected minerals and gems looks at the collection at home and goes, God, why have I got so many boxes of these things? I don’t know what to do with them. And it’s simply that we love them. We’re attracted to them. I mean, I said to you before, I’m a magpie. I love the spark and I love beauty. I also find that the discovery and the finding of them gives me an emotional connection. I have gems from Sri Lanka and Burma and places around the world I’ve been. It’s not just that they’re beautiful gems or sample minerals. They remind me of where I’ve be and I’ve discovered it myself. So I think that’s that connection with discovery that we have, that as a human nature is very big in most people’s minds. The feeling that you’re the first person to find something for the first time. It’s very easy to feel normal in the world, this discovery can sometimes make you feel quite special, but it can also make the earth feel special to you, and I think it grounds us again going back to that grounding concept. I think we will always search for gems, and i think the reason behind it goes back to emotional connection, discovery and excitement, this finding of something new.

Laurent: And believing in something precious, and beauty as well.

Helen: Yes, I wonder whether, do you think we need to believe in something precious or do you think we automatically do? Yes, I think so. I think the belief systems, in a way, they come later as a way for us to justify the natural reaction we have towards them. I’d love to know if everybody feels this way, I’d like to know how you feel. I feel an innate pull towards gemstones. If you put a really beautiful gem in my hand, I might actually slightly dribble. I’ll get the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, my stomach will jump, I get an emotional reaction to these beautiful objects, even more so than maybe a two-dimensional painting. Because of the way we talked about the light interacting this object as a 3D thing, this thing that you can touch and hold and I think that is the other thing. We touch and we hold gems, we put them close to our skin. We physically dig for them in the ground, we then create them into jewels in our hands and then we give them to somebody and we wear them close on a finger or on our neck. That touching of the gems and the jewels I think also creates a bond between us and the minerals. And I think that makes it more precious because it’s more personal.

Laurent: Beautifully said.

Helen: Will you always be searching for gems? Do you think it’s something you’ll always be doing?

Laurent: It’ll never end.

Helen: It won’t ever end. So don’t you think it will continue like that for society and humanity in general?

Laurent: I think so, I think we have that need. And for other people that might be flowers, for other that might chasing sunsets or sunrises, but I think that we have this deep need to just, yeah, also have beautiful things around us. Find beauty. They don’t necessarily need to be blingy.

Helen: No.

Laurent Or maybe bling is also something that doesn’t necessarily spark over, I mean coming back to the beginning of our conversation and I think that awe and amazement and wonder and curiosity are things that we all need so that just gives us quite a bit of that.

Helen: Oh, I love that. I love very much. Well, I hope we both continue to search and to find beauty and bling and emotional connection and discovery in everything we do.

Laurent: Thank you, Helen.

Helen: Thank you Laurent, it’s been gorgeous talking to you.

Laurent: Our guest was Helen Molesworth, Senior Curator of Jewellery at the V&A Museum, reflecting on why gems and jewels continue to shape human history. That was another Hidden Gem by SSEF, the Swiss Gemological Institute. Thank you for listening.