Vanessa Fernández’s Gold Curva Necklace Wins JCK’s Top Jewelry Honor

Vanessa Fernández’s Curva necklace took JCK’s grand prize with the kind of force that makes gold feel architectural. Set with 32.14 carats of lemon-yellow chrysoberyls and made by hand at Fernández’s bench in Miami, the piece won over a judging panel that included JCK editors Amy Elliott, Karen Dybis, Brittany Siminitz, Melissa Rose Bernardo and Victoria Gomelsky, alongside Severine Ferrari, Bebe Bakhshi, Agata Jankowiak and Grant Mobley.

That is the clearest answer yet to what award-winning gold jewelry looks like in 2026: sculptural, gemstone-driven and unmistakably made by human hands. The Curva’s appeal is not shy or decorative. It uses gold as a framework for color, then lets the stones do the talking. For shoppers, that means the strongest pieces are no longer the daintiest ones in the case. They are the ones with enough presence to read from across a room and enough precision to hold up in close-up.

The first signal to look for is a gold tone that feels rich and intentional, not merely shiny. Fernández’s necklace does not treat gold as background metal. It treats it as the body of the jewel, a warm surface that can support a large run of lemon-yellow stones without losing definition. The second signal is stone pairing. Lemon-yellow chrysoberyls create a tonal effect that feels brighter than plain metal alone, but less predictable than a single-center-stone setting. That marriage of gold and yellow-on-yellow gives the necklace its glow.

Silhouette matters just as much. Curva is built around line and movement, and that curved profile is exactly what has been rewarded at the top of JCK’s competition in recent years. The 2025 grand prize went to Norman Silverman’s yellow diamond collar, while the 2024 honor went to Rahaminov’s Celestial Diamond lariat with more than 40 carats of white and yellow pear-shape diamonds. The message is consistent: when gold wins, it often arrives as a neckpiece with a strong outline and a decisive gesture.

Craftsmanship is the final cue, and the one most buyers miss. A 2025 JCK profile described Fernández as trained in the traditional art of goldsmithing, with hand-fabricated work that is labor-intensive and time-consuming. That matters because the best gold jewelry in this bracket does not look assembled. It looks formed. JCK’s awards history shows how much weight that distinction carries: the first Jewelers’ Choice Awards drew 430 entries and 11,052 retailer votes, and the competition has long been split across 17 product categories and 55 price-based subcategories. In a field that crowded, the pieces that rise are the ones where structure, color and handwork are inseparable.