Polly Wales and Castro Smith unveil fantasy gold jewelry capsule

Polly Wales and Castro Smith have made gold feel less like a setting and more like a landscape. Their 16-piece capsule turned snakes, butterflies, ants, daisies, skulls, spiderwebs, and padlocks into one-of-a-kind jewels, with stones embedded into the metal itself and hand engraving used to sharpen the narrative. It is the kind of collaboration that makes a clear case for maker-signature pieces: jewelry that reads like a private world rather than a standard collection.

Wales, who is based in Los Angeles, built her reputation on lost-wax casting and her cast-not-set method, in which stones are embedded directly into the gold structure instead of being added after the fact. Smith, whose studio is in London, brought dense engraving and surface treatment to that foundation, including white rhodium, lilac ceramic, and red ceramic on select pieces. Together, they gave gold a distinctly illustrated quality, with molten sapphires becoming caves for engraving and negative space functioning like habitat.

The release was rolled out as both a digital and physical moment. A digital collection preview was set for June 4 at 6pm GMT, 10am PT, with a Los Angeles pop-up at PWFJHQ running June 4-5 from 11am to 5pm PT. The digital launch followed on June 5 at 6pm GMT, 10am PT, and the jewelry was sold through Polly Wales’ site. The collaboration also included a limited-edition archival pigment print by Castro Smith, editioned at 50, which extended the same sketchbook-to-object sensibility beyond the jewels themselves.

The price points confirm that this was not a broad commercial capsule but a tightly edited collector’s release. The Webs & Wings Jumbo Padlock was priced at £22,825, while The Gatherers Wide Green Sprinkle Ring came in at £13,000 and The Gatherers Rainbow Sprinkle Ring at £8,515. The Friend & Foe Green Square Signet Ring, at £6,865, sat lower in the range but still firmly in fine-jewelry territory. One Polly Wales piece, the Crawler Rainbow Clusterf@&$ Signet Ring, was cast-not-set in 18k recycled yellow gold and engraved by Smith, a useful shorthand for the collaboration’s appeal: precious metal, unusual construction, and a hand-finished surface that rewards close looking.

That is what makes the capsule feel current. In a market crowded with polished minimalism, Wales and Smith leaned into maker-led ornament, where the virtue lies in the evidence of touch. The result was gold jewelry that behaved like a collectible drawing, with every stone and incision carrying part of the story.