Polly Wales and Castro Smith craft a hand-finished fine-jewelry capsule
Polly Wales and Castro Smith turned a year of texts and voice notes into 16 one-of-a-kind jewels, from engraved signets to padlock necklaces.
Polly Wales and Castro Smith turned a year of transatlantic exchange into 16 one-of-a-kind fine-jewelry pieces, proving that personal adornment can feel as authored as a work of art. Based in Los Angeles and London, the two designers fused Wales’s cast-not-set vocabulary with Smith’s precise hand engraving, creating a collaboration that reads less like a licensing exercise than a shared visual language.
The process was as hybrid as the final work. Wales and Smith developed the capsule through texts, voice notes, video calls and occasional in-person meetings, then let each side keep its strongest signature. Wales, whose practice is rooted in ancient lost-wax casting, brought the molten, irregular terrain; Smith answered with controlled carving, excavating the metal for webs, wings, hidden creatures and other tiny surprises. The imagery moves through ants, birds, snakes, waves, blossoms, skulls, butterflies and scorpions, a bestiary that gives the jewelry its charge. Wales said the pair kept the process as open as possible and gave each other full creative freedom, while Smith said he hoped wearers would feel “like a pretty alien.”
The release landed with a digital preview on June 4, followed by a Los Angeles pop-up and launch on June 4-5, and the collection became available to buy Friday, June 5 at 6 p.m. GMT. Prices ran from about $9,265 to $30,815, placing the work firmly in the upper tier of collectible fine jewelry. Pieces included signet rings and necklaces, among them The Crawler Rainbow Clusterf@&$ Signet Ring at $18,060, the Raven signet ring, Slither, Flight of Fancy, Protector & Collector, Dew Drops, Webs & Wings, Cross Seas and Three Relics. Several pieces were sold out, a sign that the capsule struck a nerve with buyers looking for rarity rather than repetition.
For birthstone designers, the lesson is clear: symbolism becomes more persuasive when it is built into the structure of the jewel, not simply attached as a color story. Wales and Smith made personalization feel editorially sharp by pairing strong signatures, hand-finished craft and narrative imagery, so the pieces feel collected rather than customized. In a category too often trapped between solitaire and halo formulas, this collaboration shows how a birthstone jewel can become a small, wearable world.
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