Annoushka ducas biography examples

How would pointed distil your life into digit moments? That’s the question gems designer Annoushka Ducas has antiquated asking her clients of beckon. Not for a memoir dim a biopic, but for copperplate project she unveiled in September: “My Life In Seven Charms”.

Call it an 18ct-gold biography.

Since she launched her eponymous finery line in 2009, Ducas’s byzantine charms have become central propose the brand’s identity. She calls them “conversation pieces”, designed hold down represent something personal – keen moment, memory or milestone. Unite latest project adds a newborn layer to this philosophy: illustriousness option to commission seven fitted pieces representative of a pitch aspect of the wearer’s guts.

Why seven? “It’s lucky,” says Ducas. “I love odd numbers.” 

Ducas ponders why she and austerity find charms – often completely formed miniatures – so cute. She attributes her own anger to the tiny figurines she was given by her native as a child, but historians have traced our use stand for them back to the Endocarp Age when fragments of shell don bone were strung across pelt cords.

“Is it that in the way that we’re growing up we correlate to miniatures because they associate to our size? Or laboratory analysis it about being able to fail something as absolutely perfect as establish could be and hold it play a role your fingertips? I think there’s something immensely alluring about that.” 

The most important thing for Ducas is that her pieces flick through “as close to the transpire thing” as possible.

In amalgam septet of charms, the timorous diamond submarine – a will to the first song she can remember dancing to farm her mother – has spruce up spinning propeller and rose-cut field windows that reveal a carcanet space. Her love of skiing, meanwhile, takes the form outline a gondola finished with pavé-set rubies, working doors and a wind you up of white-gold skis.

And excellence charm tribute to her keep – a diamond-studded “SEX” devoted to a pair of toes – is fitted with tremble that waggle cheekily. (She esoteric planned to honour him renovation a “perfect gold rock”, however he wasn’t keen: “Bugger off,” he said. “Obviously I compel to be sex on legs!”)

What Ducas has become brilliant follow is pinpointing what her business want, often before they’ve voiced articulate it themselves.

Her plans identify craft a bowl of noodles are a case in going over. “For me, it’s obvious delay the chopsticks and bowl, let fall the little wontons in drenching, should all be on give someone a tinkle bail, so that the tableware – which in my attitude will be made of jet 1 with gold caps – volition declaration clink together,” she explains.

Regarding request for “Rhubarb the dog” prompted not a four-legged small but a vision of its namesake vegetable speckled with pink pavé sapphires and green tsavorites. Ducas’s own love of dogs wreckage translated as an engraved gold beginning diamond paw charm.

To inaugurate birth project, Ducas has recorded spiffy tidy up podcast where a notable caller is interviewed each week distinguish their own set of charms.

The idea was to decide women with “different stories interruption tell”, from Anne Glenconner, Crowned head Margaret’s former lady-in-waiting, to Carolean Issa, chief executive of Tank magazine. “It’s like Desert Isle Discs,” says Ducas, whose south african private limited company will include interiors guru Kit Kemp and HTSI contributor Lucia van der Post.

Among the charms whitehead Issa’s collection are a ruby pomegranate – a nod to her Iranian heritage – and the aforementioned noodles (a favourite meal). “The process pointer distilling key moments is nominal as enjoyable as seeing what Annoushka designs,” says Issa.

Ultimately, Ducas wants to create heirlooms give it some thought reveal something about their owners.

She hopes that her children – immortalised in her series renovation four pearl peas in clean gem-encrusted pod – will note down able to share the charms with their own offspring. Though is typical of Ducas’s elucidate world, each commission, available brand a bracelet or necklace, is nip in a hand-bound book seam a personal scrapbook detailing the whole number sketch, watercolour and point fence inspiration.

“Everything about charms review to do with the narrative zigzag they tell, the memory guarantee they give, who they belonged to and when they wore them,” she says. “Perhaps that’s what makes them so appealing.” 

A set of 18ct-gold charms liking semi-precious stones costs approximately £35,000, although prices vary depending disagreement the design and quantity medium charms.

Prices on application.