Spring is supposed to be about color arriving. Pink. Green. That particular shade of yellow that shows up in flower markets and nowhere else. And I love all of that — I do. But lately I've been moving in the opposite direction, pulling toward something slower and more interior before I let myself get swept up in the bloom.
It started, as it usually does, with a mood board.
I'd been saving images for weeks without really knowing why. Colored pencils the shade of bare wood. Eggs clustered together, their shells moving from cream to deep amber. A hand caught in the light coming through bamboo slats, the shadows turning skin into something almost painterly. A building in the city with the words How are you, really? painted across the brick. I kept coming back to that one. Not because it was brown — though it was — but because of what it was asking.
That question is actually how I approach every gemstone combination I'm considering for Spring. How are you, really? Not what do you look like next to each other. Not what's trending. But what are you actually saying when you're together?
The browns in this mood board — Roasted Pecan and Sugar Almond, the warm shadow-tones of smoky quartz — kept answering that question honestly. They don't perform. They don't try to be anything other than exactly what they are. And right now, in the middle of sorting through trays of gemstones and holding combinations up to the light, that kind of honesty feels like the right place to begin.
I think we've been conditioned to skip past brown. To treat it as the thing you put down before the real colors show up. But spend enough time with it and it starts to reveal itself — the way a brown silk dress catches light differently than any other fabric, the way old brick holds the warmth of an afternoon long after the sun has moved. Brown isn't waiting for something else to happen. It's already happening.
Color is a language. And like any language, it needs a contemplative moment before it becomes something you can actually say. I'm still in that moment with this collection — sitting with it, letting it tell me what it wants to be.
What's been surprising about this process is that I didn't have to make anything new. The pieces for Earthy Foundations were already there, living inside collections I'd built over time. I just hadn't seen them together through this particular light before. That's the thing about color — it can completely reframe what you thought you already knew. A piece I made two years ago looks entirely different when it's in conversation with a smoky quartz I've been holding onto and a natural topaz that's been sitting in a tray waiting for the right moment.
Some collections are built. This one was found.
If you want to see what I've been pulling together, the Earthy Foundations collection is here.