Daniela Villegas Finds Magic in The Healing Garden

By Brittany Siminitz | October 08, 2026

For all the beauty autumn has to offer, it’s also very much a season of transition. (And if you’re feeling particularly morbid about it, it can be considered the season where everything dies.)

For her new collection, The Healing Garden, Daniela Villegas is looking at fallen leaves, moss, flower stems, snails, and all the other tiny things one might otherwise walk right past—and considering what they can teach us about change.

Daniella Villegas snail pendant — *The Snail Dibbler in 18k yellow gold with malachite, agate, emeralds, and diamonds, price on request*

“I wanted to launch this collection in autumn because fall carries such profound spiritual symbolism,” Villegas says. “It is a season of transition, release, and the quiet wisdom of letting go.”

Trees, she points out, don’t fight particularly hard to hang on to their leaves. “Letting go is not necessarily a loss—it can be an act of trust, a surrender to the natural rhythm of life, and a preparation for what is yet to come.”

That idea sits beneath an extraordinarily colorful cast of characters in The Healing Garden: fairies and mermaids, blossoms and creatures, opals and agates, tourmalines, multicolored sapphires, chalcedony, malachite, emeralds, and diamonds. Each jewel is one of a kind, and, in typical Villegas fashion, many seem to have a personality all their own.

If that sounds rather serious for jewelry populated by wide-eyed fairies and fantastical creatures, that contradiction is intentional. “It should feel light enough to make you smile, but deep enough to make you feel something,” Villegas says. “The fantasy brings wonder. The meaning gives it soul.”

Daniela Villegas La Coqueta fairy — *La Coqueta fairy in 18k yellow gold with beryl, yellow sapphires, seed pearls, and diamonds, price on request*

For Villegas, nature is less backdrop than teacher. She describes The Healing Garden as an invitation to slow down, look inward, and reconnect with oneself at a time when life can feel particularly chaotic. “There is perhaps no greater source of wisdom and healing than Mother Nature,” she says. “Her grounding energy invites us to slow down, return to ourselves, and listen to the stillness, to our intuition, and to the quiet unseen magic that surrounds us.”

Sometimes that magic is very small, indeed. Lately, Villegas says, she’s been noticing snails, flower stems, moss on trees, little sticks, and leaves fallen on the ground. And then there are the fairies.

Daniela Villegas The Mermaid — *The Mermaid in 18k yellow gold with tourmaline, sapphires, seed pearls, and diamonds, price on request*

Their presence draws partly from one of Villegas’ favorite jewelry eras: the Victorian period, when fairies occupied an especially lively place in the cultural imagination. “I love that intersection of history, fantasy, nature, and adornment,” she says, “a world where beauty carries a little mystery and jewelry can feel like a tiny talisman discovered in an enchanted garden.”

That description could just as easily apply to Villegas’ broader body of work. Her creatures tend to smile back, stare with oversize eyes, or hide details that only reveal themselves upon closer inspection. “My visual language is joyful: smiley mouths, big bright eyes, fluid forms, and a sense of movement and life,” she says. “I want each piece to carry a spark of happiness and imagination—to feel precious without being too serious, and magical without losing its connection to the natural world.”

“In many ways, I think I have always been creating my own little fairy world, one jewel at a time.”

Daniela Villegas Blueberry Fairy — *Blueberry Fairy in 18k yellow gold with blue sapphires, tsavorite, apatite, and diamonds, price on request*

How each inhabitant comes to life varies. Sometimes the gemstones lead. Villegas points to the corals in her Fondo del Mar necklace, from which a mermaid emerges amid an imagined reef. In another work, the Blueberry Fairy itself became the starting point, its personality dictating the jewel around it.

Color, however, is nonnegotiable. “Color, color, color,” Villegas says. “It is one of the ways we feel the world before we even think about it. It also has a strong relationship with mood.”

That visual exuberance provides the initial sales hook, while the deeper opportunity may lie in what happens after a customer gets close enough to discover the story. Villegas believes wearers frequently respond to a creature or symbol before they can explain why. “It’s as if the symbol chooses them,” she says. “There is an instinctive recognition.”

Daniela Villegas The Green Man — *The Green man in 18k yellow gold with tourmalines, emeralds, green sapphires, and diamonds, price on request*

That can turn a one-of-a-kind jewel into something closer to a personal talisman—a concept Villegas sees as inherent to jewelry itself. Precious materials already carry ideas of permanence and rarity, she says, while the act of buying jewelry often commemorates something meaningful. But meaning doesn’t have to be prescribed by the designer. “One person may choose a creature because it reminds them of who they are; another because it represents who they are becoming,” she says. “That’s what I love about symbols: They can carry a universal story but become very personal once they are worn.”

Villegas herself was born Nov. 1, Día de Todos los Santos—All Saints’ Day—and says she has always been particularly attracted to creatures associated with transformation, protection, intuition, freedom, and renewal. “We shed old layers. We retreat and return. We heal. We adapt. We become.”

Which, come to think of it, sounds an awful lot like a garden in autumn.

Top: The Flower Maiden in 18k yellow gold with chalcedony, chrysoprase, beryls, tourmalines, sapphires, and diamonds, price on request; Daniela Villegas