Exclusive: Jewellery designer Rachel Quinn on capturing love through her latest collection with Gemfields

For world-leading gemstone producer Gemfields, an association with Los Angeles-based goldsmith and jewellery designer Rachel Quinn resets imaginations in more ways than one. It’s not the usual deployment of Zambian emeralds or Mozambican rubies to craft an expected set of tennis bracelets, studs, or an array of dainty rings. The collection, Crazy Love, forays into tackling and expressing the most intangible abstractions of a universal emotion— love, in its most raw, authentic, and bittersweet forms.

The ‘Lover’s Eye Brooch’ and the ‘Radiant Heart Pinky Ring’ from the Rachel Quinn + Gemfields Crazy Love collection

A “temporary insanity”, is how Quinn describes the collection. Her pieces often vacillate between the dainty and the chunky, apt for making a statement while passing as modern heirlooms laced with stories—an externality seamlessly designed to express the internal. For this venture, Quinn explored a certain liminality found within love, tapping into its nerve-wracking qualities, sans roses and rainbows. “I knew I wanted a narrative, an overarching concept of sorts as a pillar to bring to life love’s multi-faceted journey. My focus was never a limited definition of the emotion.”

Quinn’s reimagined romanticism is refreshing in a world that forces to be as concise or transactional in our strivings. However, her precision as a designer peaks through the assortment of playfully poignant offerings, each distinct in its design and sentiment. Some of Quinn’s favourites include the ‘Kiss perfume bottle’, a small vial suitable to carry your lover’s scent, as well as the ‘Lover’s eye brooch’—a memory-inducing totem—one of the first things that Quinn sketched while ideating for this collaboration.

Similarly, the large onyx heart stands as an emblem of a broken heart. “I wanted to evoke the feeling of trepidation, doubt, yearning, and being lovesick. The onyx heart was my playful take on a heart that’s shattered, especially with the little spots. And yet, that brokenness holds a lot of space for healing and growth, as on some days you’re on cloud nine while on others you’re constantly yearning. So love isn’t this one succinct emotion. It’s always in motion and ever-evolving,” Quinn tells Vogue India.