Ladybug Tsavorite, Sapphire & Diamond Earrings 18k Yellow Gold

18k Yellow Gold Earrings. 52 Round Tsavorite Garnets, 0.66 carats. 12 Round Sapphires, 0.26 carats. 10 Round Diamonds, 0.21 carats. 1.13 carats total.

A ladybug is a difficult thing to build in stones. The shape is instantly recognizable, which means there is no margin — get one proportion wrong and it stops reading as a ladybug and starts reading as a mistake. Seventy-four stones go into this pair, set into 18k yellow gold.

Tsavorite is the stone worth understanding here. It is a green grossular garnet, found in the Tsavo region of Kenya in the late 1960s, and in clean material it is rarer than emerald — which is why almost nobody is offering it to you. It also arrives at market completely untreated, which is true of very few colored stones. Because garnet has a higher refractive index than emerald, tsavorite returns more light, and that matters enormously at this scale: 0.66 carats spread across 52 small stones would go dark and flat in a lesser green. These stay lit.

Sapphires and diamonds carry the rest of the design. Sapphire is corundum at 9 on the Mohs scale and tsavorite sits at 7 to 7.5, so this is a pair you can wear without thinking about them, which is the correct way to own earrings this small.

Ladybugs are worn for luck nearly everywhere — mariquita, coccinella, Marienkäfer, every language names them affectionately. That is usually the real reason someone chooses this pair, and it is a good one.

Diamond Tales curates fine jewelry meant to last a lifetime and carry a story.