Long Haar with Temple Drop Pendants

A necklace set in gold-tone brass, set with cubic zirconia and coloured glass stones. It drops low on the chest, so it reads as a statement piece rather than a collar. The design is built around a temple arch. Photographed in Pink.

The design

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.

What it is made of

The clear stones are cubic zirconia, sold across India as American Diamond, or simply AD. Cubic zirconia is a laboratory-grown crystal of zirconium dioxide, and it is not an imitation in the way glass is: it is a genuinely hard, singly refractive crystal, cut on the same wheels as diamond. It disperses light into slightly more colour than a diamond does, which is why a good AD piece reads as bright rather than as dull paste.

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.

Which colours are stocked

One colourway is stocked, in Pink — 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.

Wearing it

Wear it with the neckline bare — a boat neck, a deep round neck, or a blouse cut away at the throat. A necklace at this weight competes with a dupatta pulled across the chest, so pin the dupatta back off the shoulder.

There is no sense in which this is an investment piece, and that is rather the point of it — you can buy a colour that suits one outfit, wear it to one wedding, and be satisfied.

Looking after it

Treat the plating as the wearing part. Keep it away from water, perfume and hair spray, put it on after you have finished dressing, and wipe it with a dry cotton cloth before it goes away. Stored dry in a zip pouch with the air pressed out, the finish lasts for years; left in a humid bathroom it will not last a season.

Stock on these runs in small lots. When a colour sells out it is usually gone for good rather than reordered, because the supplier moves on to the next design — which is why the enquiry step exists and why we confirm the shade before taking payment.

Rather than an add-to-cart button you will find an enquiry button, and that is deliberate: these arrive in small quantities per colour, and we would rather confirm the shade is in hand than refund you later. Payment is prepaid in every case; cash on delivery is not available.