I redesigned the Alba earrings four times before I let myself call them finished, and I still think about a fifth version some mornings when the light hits the current ones a certain way on my dresser. That's not really a complaint. Most of the pieces I'm proudest of took longer to simplify than they did to dream up in the first place, and Alba took longer than almost anything else I've made — not because the idea was complicated, but because it wasn't, and getting a plain curve to feel inevitable instead of arbitrary turned out to be its own kind of difficult.
The starting point was a single line I kept drawing on the edge of other sketches for weeks, a soft, asymmetric curve that didn't look like a hoop or a drop or anything I had a name for yet. I wanted something that read as sculptural without shouting about it — a shape you'd notice slowly, the way you notice a good piece of furniture is well made only after you've sat in it a few times. The first prototype came out too literal, too much like a comma pinned to an ear. The second one over-corrected and lost the curve almost entirely. It took getting the proportions wrong twice, badly, before I understood what I actually wanted: a line that looked organic, unforced, like it had been worn smooth rather than drawn.
I keep the earliest cast of it in a small dish near my bench, half as a reminder and half because I like having the failed version around when I'm second-guessing a new piece. It's rougher than what shipped, the polish uneven, one side slightly heavier than the other. I don't show it to anyone, usually. But it's the object I actually reach for when someone asks how a design comes together, because the honest answer is never a straight line from sketch to finished piece. It's four wrong versions and one that finally stops asking to be fixed.
What I didn't expect, once Alba was actually finished and out of the studio, was how differently it would read on different people. On one friend it looks architectural, almost severe, in the best way. On my sister it looks soft, like something that's always belonged to her. I used to think a good design meant controlling exactly how a piece would be perceived. Alba taught me the opposite — that the best shapes leave room for the person wearing them to finish the sentence.
I wore an early production pair on a walk by the water a few weeks ago, mostly to see how the gold caught the last of the light, and I remember being surprised all over again by how much the curve moved with the wind instead of getting lost in it. That's the thing about a shape you've spent months simplifying — you stop being able to see it clearly yourself, and then someone catches you in a good light and you remember, almost like it's new, what you were actually chasing the whole time.
I don't know if I'll ever fully stop tinkering with the idea underneath Alba, even now. There's already a version in my sketchbook with a slightly sharper curve that I haven't let myself make yet, mostly because I'm not sure the world needs it, and partly because some ideas are better left as a page in a notebook than a fifth prototype in the dish by my bench. For now, this is the shape I kept coming back to. I'm glad I didn't let myself settle for the third try.
— Arina
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