SunLit Fine Jewelry’s Shadow Collection Was a Decade in the Making

By Karen Dybis | March 11, 2025

Just like cold winter turning into warmer spring, the transition between light and dark fascinates SunLit Fine Jewelry founder Susan Hamilton Meier, and it has inspired her new collection, Shadow.

In designing the jewels, Meier has used hand-blackened silver to give them that shadowy feeling and contrast with high-karat yellow gold and brilliant diamonds. The idea to create jewelry with such an effect originated with an experience during her travels.

“I began taking photographs of shadows 10 years ago when I was spending time in Oaxaca, Mexico. There are gorgeous succulent plants everywhere there, but even more interesting than the plants themselves were their shadows,” Meier says.

*Susan Hamilton Meier says traveling to places like Egypt and Mexico inspires much of her jewelry, which she sketches with her dog, Tiger, at her side.*

“Shadows are exciting and mysterious, like the flip side of light. There is, of course, no light without shadow and no shadow without light. And there’s a kind of meta meaning to that which I find interesting,” she says.

Over the past decade, Meier has been photographing light and shadows and thinking about how this might come to life in jewelry. In late 2023, she was in Guatemala visiting a volcano, and shadows grabbed her again.

“I took loads of photos, and it finally clicked—how I wanted to express light and shade at play in jewels, to create an exciting, unexpected juxtaposition of bright and dark,” she says. “I wanted it to feel like a lush jungle of bold forms and earthly colors.”

SunLit Shadow rings — Blackened silver pieces such as, clockwise from bottom left, the Golden Halo cigar band ($1,425), Halo ring ($750 each), and Skinny stacking rings ($325 each) show the yin and yang of light and shadow, Meier says.

Last year, Meier was accepted into the Women’s Jewelry Association’s Jewelry Loupe Project, and she developed much of the Shadow collection during that program, with the mentorship of Ivette Nersesyan-Stephanopoulos of De Beers.

The process was challenging: Meier says she made about 100 sketches for the new collection, and then created prototypes to see if her designs work. For a 20-piece collection, she usually makes 40 pieces before narrowing them down.

“My influences most always come from the history of art and adornment,” Meier says. “Modernists like Alexander Calder, Louise Bourgeois, and Richard Serra were definitely in my mind, as well as ancient influences like Egyptian mythology and pre-Columbian and Chinese jade.”

SunLit Shadow Earthly Delight — *A fan of jade from her years in Asia, Meier says the first pieces she approved for the Shadow collection were the Earthly Delight pendant ($2,950) and matching earrings ($2,450).*

She lived in Asia for three years, so you can see how jade made its way into the collection. “I was very moved by the prevalence of jade adornment there, its deep symbolic and cultural significance,” she says. “Jade also is widely worn for protection and good luck. Jade felt foundational for a collection that’s all about harmony in balance.”

Interpreting the Chinese character for jade as a symbol of the connection between heaven and earth, Meier created a pendant and earrings with square jade cabochons and named them Earthly Delight. In the Shadow jewelry, she also used onyx (as in the Golden Halo cigar band ring) and moonstone (Radiance Solitaire Slice ring) for the meaning and stories behind these stones.

“Each stone has a specific energy vibration as well as personal significance to me. I also choose shapes with intentional meaning, and in this collection I wanted to honor the Egyptian goddess Hathor, who is the mother of the sun,” says Meier. “She’s known for the sun disk and horns she wears on her head. You’ll see that form echoed in an abstracted way throughout the collection.”

Top: SunLit’s Hathor collar necklace ($750) and earrings ($750) are named after an Egyptian goddess. (Photos courtesy of SunLit Fine Jewelry)