Emilie

She Aims Higher. She Does It Better. She Does Not Stop Until It Is as Good as She Knows It Can Be.

The Emilie Necklace is a luminous, warm, magnificently purposeful piece that honors the most complete and most genuinely admirable combination: ambition, excellence, and diligence — the ambition that reaches for something genuinely worth reaching for, the excellence that does the reaching with the most careful and most completely genuine attention to quality, and the diligence that keeps reaching, day after day, until the work is not just done but done as well as it can possibly be done. Soft pink and shimmering silver beads come together around a wings charm and a heart charm at approximately 18 inches in a palette as warm, luminous, and completely alive as the ambition, excellence, and diligence it was made to honor. Available in an approximately 18 in length.

Design & Materials

Wings charm — for the ambition that rises; the wings that are the most universal and most completely alive symbol of aspiration in the world — the desire to go higher, to reach further, to see more of the world from a vantage point that can only be earned by the particular, faithful, completely genuine effort of someone who has decided that where she is is not yet where she is meant to be, and who has the ambition and the diligence to do something about it
Heart charm — for the love that is the source of all genuine ambition and excellence; a reminder that the most admirable ambition is always rooted in love — love of the work, love of the people the work serves, love of the particular, completely real excellence that is possible when someone cares enough to pursue it with everything they have — and that the most genuine excellence is always, at its deepest, an act of love
Pink beads — for the warmth and tenderness of an ambition that is driven by love rather than ego; the soft, warm pink of someone whose ambition is not cold or competitive but warm and completely genuine — who reaches for excellence not to prove something to the world but because she loves the work and the people it serves and cannot bring herself to give them anything less than the very best she has
Silver beads — for the precision and clarity of an excellence that is as sharp and as completely real as the most luminous metal in the world; the cool, clear silver of someone whose diligence is as precise and as completely genuine as the color itself — who does the work with the particular, careful, completely real attention of someone who understands that excellence is not an accident but a choice, made again and again, in every detail, every step, and every moment of the work from the first to the last
Approximate length: ~18 in
Handcrafted with care by Amelia Heir Art Designs

The Meaning Behind It

Ambition, excellence, and diligence — the name Emilie comes from the Latin aemulus, meaning “striving to excel,” and the most genuinely excellent people have always understood what that striving actually requires: not the ambition that is loud and self-promotional and always looking for the next opportunity to be seen, but the ambition that is quiet and purposeful and completely focused on the work itself — the particular, faithful, completely genuine ambition of someone who knows what she is capable of and is not willing to settle for anything less. The excellence that this ambition produces is not the excellence of someone who is trying to impress anyone; it is the excellence of someone who has a standard that is entirely her own, that is higher than anyone else's expectations, and that she holds herself to not because anyone is watching but because she is watching, and she knows the difference between work that is good enough and work that is genuinely, completely excellent. And the diligence that sustains both is the most unglamorous and most genuinely admirable quality of all: the faithful, daily, completely genuine commitment to doing the work well, every time, without exception, because the work is worth it and she is the kind of person who does not know how to give anything less than everything she has. Emilie is a necklace for those women — the ambitiously excellent, the diligently striving ones — and for everyone who has ever benefited from their excellence and understood, in receiving it, exactly how much ambition and diligence went into making it exactly as good as it is.

A perfect gift for Valentine's Day, spring, winter, or any occasion that calls for celebrating a woman whose ambition, excellence, and diligence — warm, precise, and completely her own — make everything she does more beautiful, more excellent, and more completely, genuinely worth the effort.