Some jewelry collections begin with months of sketching. Other times, it starts with a gem dealer you can’t stop thinking about.
For the new Dew Drops collection from Onirikka, it’s the latter.
While visiting the Tucson gem shows this past February, designer Gloria Batlle came across a company whose hand-carved teardrop stones immediately caught her attention. She walked away, stared at the photos on her phone for a couple of hours—and then went back. “I am always attracted to clean silhouettes,” she says. “I like to touch jewelry and feel something. I fell in love with the shape of the stone.”
She bought a selection in the palette she wanted and began developing what would become Dew Drop: limited-edition pendants in white opal, chrysoprase, wood, and peach eosite, each topped with an 18k yellow gold and diamond cap and oversize enhancer bail. The resulting pieces are simple in outline, but hardly uniform.
Soft-toned drops receive full pavé caps for a more elegant effect—white becomes something of a blank canvas, dotted with scattered diamonds, while the black and green versions get a crisp, linear treatment. “I don’t tend to do matchy-matchy,” Batlle says. “I go more with what I feel when I see the piece and work around that.”
That instinctive approach extends to the materials themselves. The palette was partly inspired by the tropics (Batlle grew up in El Salvador, and now resides in Boca Raton, Fla.), but she also wanted shades that could feel at home in the city. And while opal and chrysoprase fit comfortably within traditional fine jewelry expectations, wood was intentionally less obvious. “I like contrast in general,” she says. “I like mixing materials that wouldn’t probably be put together, because it makes the piece more interesting.”
Pairing wood with 18k gold and diamonds also allowed her to push the design in a slightly more masculine direction—another reminder that the collection’s teardrop silhouette doesn’t have to read one particular way.
Versatility was central from the beginning. The enhancer bails are deliberately generous enough to accommodate thicker chains, while the pendants can also be worn on leather cords, or with leather and gold together. “I love pieces that can be dressed down or up,” she says.
That makes the collection especially interesting from a retail perspective. The Dew Drops aren’t being presented as a single finished necklace customers purchase and wear one way. The cord and chain options are sold separately, leaving the wearer room to change the personality of the same pendant—or eventually collect several. And while collectibility is built into the concept, the designer is reluctant to prescribe a proper starting point. “There are no rules to jewelry, in my opinion,” she says. “They are all so different, yet similar.”
A customer could wear one with jeans and a T-shirt, move it onto gold for something more polished, or take it all the way to a gala dress. Another might choose different colors according to mood.
That may ultimately be Dew Drop’s strongest proposition. The recognizable shape provides continuity, but the color, material, diamond selection, and necklace choice keep any one piece from feeling like simply another version of the same thing. “I love the idea that these pendants are collectible,” she says, “because they offer styling versatility.”
And in a moment when jewelry wardrobes are becoming less about perfectly coordinated sets and more about personal combinations, that freedom feels particularly well timed.
Dew Drop pendants are available in white opal, chrysoprase, wood, and peach eosite, with 18k yellow gold and diamond caps; prices begin at $3,600. Leather cords and gold chains are sold separately.
Top: Onirikka’s Dew Drops pendants in 14k yellow gold with chrysoprase, white opal, peach eosite, and wood with diamonds, starting at $3,600; Onirikka
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