Gabi Torres remembers the moment as if it just happened—the life-changing experience on a business trip when she saw a watermelon tourmaline that seemed to call to her.
That amazing gemstone, combined with the birth of daughter Gaia in 2022, led Torres to start her own jewelry company, Sanamama, in 2024. She calls her transition into jewelry “an organic unraveling,” as she gradually shifted from art therapist to yoga teacher to designer.
Her brand’s name comes from Spanish for healing mother, a phrase that guides Torres in her life as a mom and working with her clients. She hopes her jewelry and its spiritual meanings allow people to feel beautiful, attract abundance, and understand their worth.
“I believe the earth mother has provided us with these gems to uplift our vibrations in distinct ways. Every stone has a purpose,” says Torres. “Whether you are reaching toward green tourmaline for tranquility or a pink tourmaline to connect to the energy of love, each piece is unique and has a spiritual significance.”
Torres was born and raised in Miami, to a Panamanian mother and Puerto Rican father. “I have so many cultures in me,” she says. “We are a melting pot of all kinds of cultures, from Native American to German to Lebanese Italian.”
She recalls a childhood where jewelry was associated with travel—family members would bring back special pieces from their trips and share them as gifts with her and others.
“The women on my mother’s side of the family had designed pieces of jewelry since my mother’s great-grandmother. Not for selling, but for creating personal treasures…many times abroad on their travels.”
During high school, Torres worked in retail and then as a model, a job she describes as empowering. “It was a great way to learn to love and accept myself for exactly how I was and own my uniqueness,” she says.
When she got to college, Torres debated what to major in: Science followed her family tradition, but art felt like a calling. Ultimately she majored in psychology and double minored in studio art and micro and molecular biology, graduating with honors from the University of Central Florida in 2011.
“My favorite medium was painting, and I engaged in some exhibitions later in graduate school,” says Torres, who received a dual master’s in art therapy and marriage and family therapy from Loyola Marymount in 2013.
“It was all about the healing properties of artistic mediums, and it opened for me the insight to the soul connection I was looking for within art making and the motivation I had to help people heal through making art,” Torres says.
After graduate school, Torres was seeing art therapy clients while training as a yoga instructor. When she began teaching yoga, her students told her the classes felt therapeutic for them, so she started thinking of her practice as a way to heal people.
“The most important lessons of those years was to hone in and master one thing while integrating different aspects that were also me, such as the therapy and the yoga teaching,” says Torres.
She became interested in crystals and would work with clients to add these stones to their homes. It was on a trip with a friend to source crystals that the watermelon tourmaline caught Torres’ attention. She commissioned a necklace with that gemstone, and the future began to reveal itself—her focus turned to jewelry.
“I create and design with intention and spirit so that choosing your jewelry becomes a ritual of working with energy in a personal way through this medium,” Torres says. “It is an art, an enhancer of beauty.
“Sanamama is for the seeker, for the goddesses of our time. It usually calls a woman that is on the brink of a transformation, someone open-minded and someone who has a unique sense of style.”
Top: Gabi Torres founded Sanamama as part of her motherhood and spiritual journey through jewelry design. (Photos courtesy of Sanamama)
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