Lakshmi Coin Necklace Set

A necklace set in gold-tone brass, set with cubic zirconia and coloured glass stones. It sits just below the collarbone, which is the easiest necklace length to wear. The design is built around a temple arch. Photographed in Red.

A closer look

Temple jewellery copies the shapes of South Indian shrine architecture: the arched niche, the stepped tower, the figure set into a frame. It is the most formal of all the Indian jewellery idioms.

Shaped drops hang below the main body of the piece, lengthening the line and keeping the design from reading as a solid block.

Materials

Cubic zirconia does the work. Known in India as American Diamond, it is a grown crystal, hard enough to hold a sharp facet edge and bright enough to carry a whole design on its own. Where there is colour it is glass, and that is the right choice — glass takes a deeper, more saturated colour than CZ ever will.

The broad rim around each coloured stone is the kundan idiom, carried over from a technique in which pure gold foil is pressed cold around the stone until it holds. Nothing here is gold foil, but the proportions are the ones that technique produced.

Colour options

One colourway is stocked, in Red — the shade the design was drawn for and the one in the photographs.

Underneath the plating the piece is brass, finished with a premium gold polish. The weight in your hand is the brass; the colour is the polish.

Keep the rest of the upper body plain. With a piece this size the necklace and the earrings are the whole ornament — skip the chain, skip a second pendant, and let the neckline do the framing.

What you are buying at this price is design rather than material, and that is a reasonable thing to buy. The shapes here come out of a jewellery tradition several centuries old, and they work at a tenth of the weight and a hundredth of the cost of the gold versions.

Looking after it

The care is simple and it matters: no water, no perfume, no chemicals on the metal. Wipe it dry after wearing and store it sealed rather than in open air, because humidity is the enemy of any plated finish.

If you are building a set, the pieces in this collection are drawn from the same supplier and the same finish, so a necklace and a pair of earrings bought separately here will match in tone. That is not true across brands, where one gold polish can be visibly cooler than another.

This piece is listed for enquiry rather than instant checkout, because stock on the colour you want has to be confirmed before we take money for it. Use the enquiry button on this page and we will come back with availability, the final price and a delivery window. Payment is prepaid in every case; cash on delivery is not available.