High jewellery often begins with a dream, but at Cartier, it begins with the stone. For the Cafayate necklace, that meant two spectacular opals—alive with flashes of red, orange, and yellow—that instantly set the creative tone. “Everything starts with the stone—literally,” Alexa Abitbol, Cartier’s high jewellery manufacture director, told us during a recent visit to the maison’s closely guarded high jewellery ateliers in Paris. “Once the stones arrive, the designers choose what speaks to them. Then they draw around the stones.”
From there, the Cafayate necklace travelled through the high jewellery workshop, where jewellers, lapidaries, setters and polishers shape ideas into precious material. Its silhouette—an elegant, V-shaped cascade—was first sculpted in clay and wax. “There are certain volumes you simply cannot imagine in two dimensions,” Abitbol explains. Weekly meetings with designers refine the articulation, the movement, and the interplay of curves.
Colour is the heartbeat of this piece. The opals’s iridescence is extended outward through Umba sapphires in warm gradients, creating a soft, sunlit glow. But naturalistic colour placement is harder than it looks. “Randomness looks simple, but it takes a human eye—an algorithm cannot make it come alive,” says Abitbol. Each stone is positioned, reconsidered, repositioned—sometimes dozens of times—until the composition feels effortless.
Behind the scenes, the finishing is just as meticulous. Cartier’s polishers use the centuries-old jaconas technique to smooth the stone seats, ensuring the opals and sapphires catch as much light as possible. Even the hidden metalwork receives the same attention. “We polish the inside of a panther’s head—even though no one will ever see it—because the diamonds must shine perfectly,” Abitbol says. That philosophy applies here too: the unseen must be as flawless as the visible.
When the final assembly is complete, the workshop gathers for what Cartier calls the “staff reveal”—the first time anyone sees the finished jewel. “The last week is when the magic happens; everything finally comes together,” Abitbol reflects.
The result is a necklace that feels alive: opals that glow like embers, sapphires that ripple with warmth, and craftsmanship that disappears into pure, fluid colour.
This story first appeared on GRAZIA Singapore.
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