Ellie Chen

The jewelry left untouched on my catch-all dish is piles of bracelet and necklace links that trap the hair on the back of my neck; I avoid chain patterns that create conflict with my body.

Occasionally, I do make the sacrifice of wearing one of my favorite chokers with a dainty blue pendant made from Murano glass, whose engraved spiral motif reminds me of a large “Jetty” sculpture in Utah’s Great Salt Lake made from a mass of sand and basalt chunks creating the same perfect-ratio form. The real entropy, from the shape Robert Smithson appropriated to represent the effects of nature’s disorder, is the fifteen minutes I always put aside to free myself from the necklace’s snake chain and lobster clasp, inevitably losing the chunk of my hair that falls to the floor in the process. At this rate, my individual strands will be weathered into an undercut by this ritual, like the waves and footsteps that have eroded the Spiral Jetty faux pier.

The spoils of Earth’s four elements, including the aquatic, typically don’t accompany self-deterioration like an elevated balding risk. Rather, what’s precious depletes rare or difficult natural discoveries worn like a medal. Ignoring the occasional pins and needles from a garland of pierced and assorted apple seeds, my mother’s childhood creation she gifted to me, I feel a sense of protection wearing it. Knowing these seeds are inedible since they contain high cyanide content makes me almost feel like the warden from Louis Sachar’s children’s novel “Holes,” if she was benevolent and didn’t slap the adolescents at a troubled teens program she ran in the Wild West. More appropriately, I imagine wearing the appleseed necklace is what my ancestors felt like when they would carry around garlic cloves to repel vampires. Would it be a stretch to say that I may even feel like a certain American folk hero?

This is a mini lookbook for all of my hunters and gatherers out there.

No worries if you’re new to this. We all had to start from somewhere, so luckily the obvious birth stone gateway that has existed since day one. If you’re born in January, this could be both a birthday gift and a New Year’s resolution, but I was born in June so I personally wouldn’t start my 2026 with garnet earrings, much less pearls that I hardly consider stones, since they come from mollusk innards as opposed being dug down under. Besides, the only real stone that fits in between categories in the hunting and gathering Venn diagram is maybe amber, which is also a pseudostone since it’s hardened tree sap from the Baltics instead of assorted igneous rock.

For the general sake of nature, the top recommendations for bijoux de terre—French for jewelry of the Earth—catalog contain everything on, in, and around the planet. Besides, this column has already exhausted itself of precious stone discourse, courtesy of the October 24 issue “Mica boss: shine bright like a diamond with bold editorial makeup.” It’s been a long time coming to not outgrow this content and complete the circle of life. Maybe if there is some type of gold-rush-worthy material discovered extraterrestrially, I’ll report on it Dune-style, but for now let’s move on from beating a dead horse to focus on a rabbit with a similar fate.

The inverse of a protective talisman made from found material is what remains from the chase for game. I still scoff when I enter a lodge back in Ohio and the soulless, taxidermied head of a buck on the wall feels omnipresent, but I know better than to forget my humble origins, not solely geographically. We always touted our prizes in good spirits with the best pelts and bones around our necks to the rest of our (vibe) tribes. It’s the suede string connected to a paw that’s soft and comforting to the touch, almost nostalgic and uniquely human. Experts call it early flexing. I wore something of the sort around my neck when I was seven, connected to a suede string.