Rifle through the jewelry boxes of previous generations, and you’ll find hand-cut mined gems in 18-karat gold, strands of natural pearls, and maybe a hand-carved cameo or micromosaic brooch. Today’s heirlooms, however, are likely to include laser-cut stones in 3D-printed structures, richly colored titanium, and man-made gems in modern alloys. In an industry where expertise can drive exceptional value, technology is ushering in new modes of craftsmanship.
The art of printing
Direct metal printing is now a well-established jewelry technique. A form of additive manufacturing (AM) — in which the 3D printer generates the finished product a layer at a time, rather than cutting it out of a larger block of material — this method uses a powdered version of the metal and melts it with a laser to form a solid structure. AM currently comes with a price tag 20% to 30% higher than traditional production methods and requires advanced expertise.
While high-end brands are sometimes less than open about the use of direct metal printing, independent jeweler Boltenstern has made the technique a part of its DNA and met with consumer success.
“3D-printed jewelry is a growing segment,” says Marie Boltenstern, who took over the Vienna-based family business in 2015. An architect by training, she has used her skills to create printing algorithms for the brand, basing them on nature-inspired geometry.
“Like in nature, the goal is to generate creations that are unique in shape or behavior,” she explains. “3D models are highly precise. A common misconception is that technology can make existing designs cheaper or faster, but it’s not actually interesting to produce what can already be handmade. Printing technology needs a special skill set.”
Boltenstern’s polyamide-based Fabnora line won the Fashion Jewelry of the Year award at the 2023 Inhorgenta show, and the company prints its Embrace fine-jewelry collection around the stones themselves, encasing each gem in a web of gold to produce jewels that come out fully assembled. After working closely with printer developers for over a decade, Boltenstern recently proved its product’s scalability by supplying a Hong Kong retailer with 6,000 pieces.
Platinum plus
Scottish-American designer Maeve Gillies recently launched a 3D-printed collection that combines platinum and titanium. Printed by metallurgy company Progold with support from Platinum Guild International (PGI), the 30-piece Tùsaire collection aims to showcase the technique’s design possibilities.
“We wanted to put 3D printing of platinum to the test in the hope of expediating the technology’s application in jewelry,” says Tai Wong, PGI’s global director of innovation. Technology also aided stone-setting in the hero piece, a torque necklace centering a Renfrewshire quartz. The jeweler had the stone pre-scanned so it could print the necklace to fit.
The pieces in the collection honor Gillies’s roots, with their Celtic-inspired patterns alternating polished and unpolished layers of platinum. The complex hollow forms, textural contrasts, and interlocking structures created the ideal playground for a designer who loves to meld past and future. “Printing directly in precious metal is a gateway to an exciting new world of possibilities,” enthuses Gillies.
Rapid prototyping, reduced waste, and the ability to create more complex designs are some of the advantages of AM. NanoParticle Jetting (NPJ) — a trademarked method from AM company XJet — creates much thinner printed layers, enabling high-resolution designs and new effects with metal blends.
Progold chairman Damiano Zito believes NPJ “has the potential to revolutionize high-jewelry production, offering new creative opportunities for designers while ensuring sustainability and cost-effectiveness.” By offering his clients support for adopting NPJ, he hopes to make it a “standard production method, rather than just an experimental process.”
Alloyed ventures
Along with relatively new-to-jewelry metals like flexible aluminum and super-light titanium, custom alloys are becoming more popular as the price of gold skyrockets.
PGI is also behind Inoveo, a platinum alloy it developed with metal innovator Alloyed. With demand for platinum growing, the goal was to create a version that would be easier to work with. The Inoveo blend is up to 40% harder and four times less porous than standard platinum alloys, with a lower melting point and higher fluidity — a combination that gives white gold a run for its money at the bench.
Another recent metallurgic advancement comes from Austrian goldsmith Thomas Hauser, who created Niellium — a deep black, non-oxidizing alloy of platinum, palladium and silver.
Growing in new directions
Man-made gemstones are also here to stay, and producers can now grow them large enough to cut an entire piece of diamond jewelry from a single stone — like the solid-diamond ring the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) evaluated in 2023, or lab-grown company Vrai’s Solitaire Cross pendant.
Jeweler and scientist Sofie Boons believes the industry is not yet fully exploiting this technology. She has extensively researched lab-grown crystals, which she believes are “undervalued.” A visit to an industrial crystal producer “highlighted the creative potential of these materials and a lack of innovation in the jewelry industry,” she recalls. With the aid of a UK Crafts Council research fellowship, she has worked with crystal growers to develop innovations like phosphorescent specimens, and investigated ways to reuse crystal waste.
Last year, she made headlines as the first person to grow a ruby inside a platinum ring setting, using waste ruby material as the seed. “In-situ gemstone growth reimagines the setting process, aligning with bio-design,” she explains. “[During the process,] natural facets appear, and while post-growth faceting is possible, I prefer to celebrate [the natural ones].”
Boons is calling for a shift in lab-grown terminology “to keep up with the times” and further distinguish this category as its own market segment. “I refer to these gemstones as ‘neo-gemstones,’” she says.
She also believes generative artificial intelligence (AI) will soon be a key element of computer-aided design (CAD). Programs like Dzine.ai and Meshy.ai can generate designs from either text or visual prompts and are useful for brainstorming. Meanwhile, some brands are considering digitizing their archives to create an AI library that could inspire future designs.
AI does come with concerns about transparency, intellectual property, and design homogeneity. “It’s educational institutions’ and users’ duty to question the ethics, impact and potential applications of AI…to ensure it improves our context,” Boons cautions.
Engineering feats
Ideally, advancements in technology can free up craftspeople for more human innovation.
By automating simple goldsmithing and setting, art jeweler Cindy Chao has been able to free up her team to explore new materials like precious wood and ox horn. Integrating organic materials with gold and titanium is complex, and for her 20th Anniversary Collection Foliage brooch, she looked to traditional mortise-and-tenon architectural systems for seamless joins that would create a curve replicating the natural form of a leaf.
One of the most spectacular recent uses of technology occurred in Paris’s Place Vendôme. Inspired by memories of her childhood by the ocean, Boucheron creative director Claire Choisne used 5D nanostructuring to engrave custom audio into glass for a special edition of the maison’s Quatre ring, turning it into a vessel for emotion (see box).
“I wanted to encapsulate, for billions of years, a memory,” she says. “This piece proves that we have still not reached the boundaries of jewelry, and we will continue to push them, so as to fully express the strength of our creative vision.”
Sound design: The Quatre 5D Memory ring
To capture the sound of the ocean for its Quatre 5D Memory ring, Boucheron partnered with the French Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM). After obtaining the audio, the jeweler used an ultrafast nanostructuring technique to embed it in the ring.
This technique, known as 5D, encodes information in a type of glass consisting of birefringent microscopic structures. In simple terms, that means one can engrave text, images, videos and sound into — rather than onto — the glass in binary code via an optical pulse laser. Boucheron used sculpted Glassomer silica glass to create the 5D Memory ring, setting the sound recording into one of the Clou de Paris squares in its stacked Quatre design, which features glass bands around a central band of diamonds.
The ring can contain up to 100 megabytes of data, which a polarized light illumination microscope can read and translate back into its original format — making this a truly high-tech heirloom.
Main image: Rings in Niellium from Atelier Allure by Thomas Hauser. (Atelier Allure)
