Take a back seat, polished gold. Your shiny and reflective surface has been looking a bit too brash recently as the matte, low-key look of brushed gold has been catching everyone’s eye.
At the high jewelry presentations in January in Paris, for example, Chaumet used brushed gold to great effect in Un Air de Chaumet, a collection that was an ode to lightness and movement. The Plumes d’or tiara featured a burst of brushed and textured rose gold feathers that alternated with diamond-set white gold ones, the contrast creating a play of light. The tiara could be transformed into a brooch or a head ornament, with an asymmetrically set 2.30-carat pear-shape diamond offering a figurative interpretation of a bird. Matching ear cuffs would create a set.
Un Air was not Chaumet’s first exploration with brushed gold. Last year, the house introduced the finish in a pendant design for its signature fine jewelry line, Liens, which features a crisscross motif.
And in September the Cartier Love bracelet, which has become one of jewelry’s most recognizable designs since it was created in 1969 by the designer Aldo Cipullo, debuted in brushed gold, but with its signature screws retaining their polished finish.
“The contrast between polished and brushed surfaces is really in our aesthetic vocabulary,” said Pierre Rainero, Cartier’s director of image, style and heritage, who noted that the house often combines polished and satin finishes in its watches. “The mix of the two effects is very interesting — the way it plays with light differently.”
And, he noted: “The brushed gold exaggerates the contrast between the screws and rest of the surface. It underlines the essence of the Love bracelet, which is something you fix on your wrist.”
Caroline Morrissey, head of jewelry at Bonham’s New York, linked the rise in brushed finishes to the current craze for yellow gold, as the treatment is most commonly seen on that precious metal. “In the secondary market, big, bold yellow-gold jewelry is what people are going bananas for right now,” she said.
And while what she called polished gold’s “gleaming and crisp, high reflective polish” has long been more coveted, she said she can see why brushed gold has been gaining ground: “Designers are probably looking to revitalize old techniques to keep the love of gold strong, but also provide something that’s a little bit different,” she said. “Brushed gold provides a level of depth and a different type of look that the creator has some control over.”
The Lebanese jeweler Dina Kamal deliberately works almost exclusively in brushed gold, as the finish tones down her creations. “Whenever I do something mega, like with big diamonds, brushed gold is a way to humble it, to balance it,” she said.
Cue her Square Webbed Necklace, a statement piece that was inspired by chain mail and wears like a mesh breastplate. Set with nearly 240 diamonds totaling 29.4 carats, every piece of gold that touches a stone has been brushed by hand.
“That tones it down and makes you focus on the grid and malleability rather than the diamonds,” she said.
And as her beige-gold Tribal Disc Torc choker featured a 5.32-carat emerald-cut diamond, the brushed gold finish helped to “calm down the metal that’s holding this diamond popping out in the front,” she said.
Brushing gold is, in itself, a delicate art. “There are a zillion ways to brush a piece right, and you can ruin it,” Ms Kamal said. Specific patterns, angles, direction, depth, consistency of machine or hand-crafting, and what she described as “how the rhythm is moved around a jewel” can all influence the final finish.
“Brushing is sort of the language of the piece that can completely change it depending on who’s doing the brushing,” she said. “Even the last person that holds a piece to finish it can make or break the piece — they can kill the piece, literally.”
Louisa Guinness, the founder and curator of her namesake gallery in London, said she has always gravitated toward brushed gold. “I’m definitely not a big bling person,” Ms. Guinness said. “Brushed gold is totally in the realm of what I love. You feel like you’re part of the metal — it’s very tactile, you can rub it and be at one with the metal a bit more.”
For example, the Water Earrings, which the sculptor Anish Kapoor created for the gallery, contrasted a highly polished gold interior with an outer ring of brushed gold, giving the jewel “a huge kind of depth, the light bouncing through it,” Ms. Guinness said.
“Different textures side by side are something I’ve always been really interested in. It enhances the qualities of both and makes them do their jobs better — like putting black against white. You see the strongest of each.”
Another of her gallery’s artists, Emefa Cole, a champion for traceability in gold mining, sculpted her organic Worth Its Weight rings in brushed gold, which Ms. Guinness said helps to accentuate the material’s rawness.
The Lebanese designer Nada Ghazal said she always uses a brushed gold finish as it is “grounded and glamorous but not flashy,” referring to her chunky Unlock Courage Ring with an understated keyhole motif and Door of Self Love necklace, which featured an archway design accented with pink sapphire.
And brushed gold can also push a jeweler’s creativity. While Boghossian’s Desert Rose collection, named for the naturally occurring crystals found in sand formations, initially was crafted in rose quartz, the house added a brushed gold design last summer.
It featured overlapping layers of textured gold petals, flecked with half-moon, oval and triangular shape diamonds to evoke the sun sparkling on crystallized sand.
“The effect was achieved through careful brushing and meticulous hand crafting,” Roberto Boghossian, the house’s managing director, wrote in an email, “resulting in a shimmering effect that enhances the luminosity of the pink tone.”
