About Florence
A few years ago I bought a Victorian mourning brooch at an antiques fair in Suffolk for £40. Black enamel, a small woven plait of hair under glass, an inscription on the back that I had to take to a museum in Bath to decipher from copperplate. It had belonged to a Sarah Cooke, who lost her husband Edward in 1862, and who I’m fairly sure went on to live another forty years and remarry someone called Joseph. That brooch sits in a bowl on my dresser. It cost less than a nice dinner. It’s the most interesting thing I own.
This is what I think jewellery is for. Not the stone. The stone is sometimes nice, sometimes spectacular, sometimes worth more than a small flat in Glasgow. But the stone is also a slightly absurd lump of crystallised carbon, or a chunk of beryl that grew in a Brazilian pocket of rock, and on its own it tells you nothing. What I want to know — what I think most people who buy beautiful things actually want to know — is the story behind it. Who wore it first. Why it was made the way it was made. What it meant to wear a black diamond in 1840, or rubies in mourning, or pearls at a coronation. Whether the curse on a particular diamond is real (it isn’t), and why people kept believing in it anyway (a much more interesting question).
The Gem exists because I couldn’t find a publication that took both halves of this seriously: the beauty and the history, the aspiration and the strange. There are jewellery sites that read like trade catalogues, and history sites that treat anything decorative as somehow lesser. Neither felt like home. So I built this one.
A bit about me
I grew up in Yorkshire, came to London for university, and never quite left. I trained as a magazine writer and editor and have been doing one or the other for fifteen years. I live near the King’s Road in a flat with too many books and one very specific cat. I spend most Saturdays at auction previews or in the jewellery rooms of the V&A, both of which I recommend even — especially — if you have no plans to buy anything. The pieces I own are a complete mess: a Cartier-something from my grandmother, a signet I bought myself for my thirtieth that I wear every day, several rings that cost about £30 each and that I love equally, and the Sarah Cooke brooch.
What you’ll find here
Long-form writing on the history and provenance of particular pieces, from royal jewels to celebrity collections to the strange and the spectacular. Style writing on how people actually wear things in 2026, men and women, formally and not. And proper buying guides, the kind I’d write for a friend who’d asked me where to begin. The guides carry affiliate links and I’ll tell you that openly. They never recommend a brand I wouldn’t recommend to that friend.
I write most of what’s here, with occasional commissions from people whose work I admire: photographers, jewellers, historians, the woman who runs the antiques stall where I bought the brooch. If you’ve come across something I should know about, I’d like to hear from you. The contact page works.
— Florence