Love Letters: Seals of approval

Seal & Scribe has won admirers with its repurposing of antique seals as luxurious jewellery. With its first-ever collection dedicated to love, can it win hearts too?

By Rachael Taylor

A winged, cherubic Cupid softly stoops to better deal with his load: a wheelbarrow tipped to overflow with hearts. Above his head arcs the French word choisissez; each letter carefully carved onto a mould in an imperfect script that could only have been made by hand, and then cast in bottle-green glass. Choose, it implores us… choose love.

Shari Cohen, founder of San Diego-based jewellery house Seal & Scribe, has indeed chosen. Love Letters, a collection of nine rings set with antique seals, celebrates romance in all its forms.

Each has a pleasingly quixotic sentiment, with inscriptions including il est a vous (he’s yours) and sempre più t'amo (I love you more and more). Some rely on imagery alone, such as the Seal & Scribe ring titled The Higher They Fly, The Tighter The Bond, which has at its centre an aqua glass seal with an engraving of two birds holding a knotted rope between them as one flies off.

Choose Love 18ct rose gold ring set with an antique green glass seal with the French word Choississez (choose) and two rose-cut diamonds housed in Georgian-style blackened silver cut-down settings.

Alternative love tokens

Originally, Cohen wanted Love Letters to be a collection of truly unique engagement rings; not bespoke twists on standard designs or a quirky stone choice, but something truly unrepeatable. With this in mind, she started to put the more romantic of the seals she was collecting to one side, saving them until she had a selection strong enough for a themed edit.

For Cohen, jewellery has always equated love and family. “I came from a family of jewellery lovers,” she says. “My great-grandmother was a jewellery hound, and bought her own jewellery long before women bought for themselves.”

It was also a popular gift on special occasions. Her first such gift, at the age of six, came in the form of cash from her grandfather, along with instructions that it should be spent on a piece of jewellery. “I remember being in the car with my father, driving to go pick it out, and I was so excited,” says Cohen, who selected a heart-shaped locket that she still has to this day.

A selection of rings from the Seal & Scribe Love Letters collection. Each ring is set with an antique seal that carries a romantic message.

Self-soothing with seals

In her adult life, this connection with jewellery became a form of self love. Cohen studied fine art at college, specialising in photography and video, but soon became disenchanted with how commercial the art world was at the business end. She backed away, joining the Peace Corps, through which she taught art in Botswana. This led to a career as a consultant in international development, which involved a lot of stressful missions on the ground, such as working with women with HIV in Dharavi, Mumbai, one of the world’s largest slums.

“When I would come home from these missions that were really intense, the way I would decompress would be to sit on the couch late at night and scroll through antique jewellery listings,” she says. “Just scrolling, scrolling, looking at beautiful things, and it was like I didn't have to think about anything. It was the only thing that could shut my mind off.”

Antique seals particularly piqued her interest. These are small engravings made in coloured glass, or in gems and hardstones such as carnelian, sardonyx, bloodstone and amethyst. These useful objects were common in the 18th and 19th centuries, and would have been pressed into wax to seal letters. Some would have been heraldic, while others would be used to pass secret messages, or perhaps just to raise a smile. They might have been kept by scribes in sets, or perhaps added to a gentleman’s key fob and carried in his pocket, jangling amongst coins and trinkets.

“The very first one I got was a pale-white milky chalcedony, and it was a hand-carved swan on water,” she remembers. “It was so meticulous that when you viewed the details through a loupe, it was just shocking. It was this tiny etching, not even half an inch by a quarter of an inch. In college, I did lithography and I did some intaglio, and it's not easy to do. To do this so tiny and so meticulously, and to carve it into a hardstone, is crazy.”

Shari Cohen, the designer and founder of Seal & Scribe.

The dawn of Seal & Scribe

Mindless scrolling of antique jewellery had turned to purposeful thinking, driven by the idea that “there’s got to be a better way to present this” than hanging such seals framed in metal fobs. While she wasn’t yet sure how best to do that, Cohen kept collecting, and has now spent more than a decade seeking out and acquiring unusual seals. First on her checklist when evaluating a seal is that it should be of high quality and in as good a condition as possible. After this, she favours bright colours and rare sentiments or illustrations.

Naturally, these once-functional objects will have been subjected to wear and tear over the centuries, often displaying small scratches, or minuscule nicks that Cohen likes to call “flea bites”. All of this adds to the charm, she believes; although seals that have lived more boldly than others are treated to a proprietary rejuvenation process that Seal & Scribe has developed with its goldsmiths. Although this does, she says, come with some risk: “We have had a couple blow up on us.”

When Cohen launched her brand Seal & Scribe in 2016, she showed the world the potential of these forgotten communication tools as modern adornments. Long gone are the metal fobs that would once have held the seals. Instead, Cohen’s designs place them in luxurious rings and pendants, crafted by expert artisans in gold and platinum. Though her style is resolutely contemporary, some pieces gently nod to the heyday of seals through elements such as rose-cut diamonds, blackened silver, and Georgian-style cut-down settings. There are also earrings and cufflinks, which are made possible by using matching pairs of reproductions that are created by hand-casting original seals in gold.

My Heart Is There For You ring in 18ct yellow gold and diamonds, with an antique red glass seal with the French message Il est a vous (he’s yours).

Always on the hunt

Due to the happenstance nature of sourcing the seals, Seal & Scribe’s jewellery had always been released piece by piece, with much of it created to order. Cohen estimates that as much as 85% of what she designs is bespoke, with 95% sold to women buying for themselves, and she will often have clients in mind when evaluating potential seals.

“I have clients who tell me what colour, sentiment or imagery they are interested in,” she says, explaining that it is best to keep requests as general as possible due to the rarity of the seals, and the luck involved in sourcing.

“Sometimes I'll get people that contact me and they don't realise these are antiques. They'll say, I want the yellow lion but I want it in blue. And it's like, I'm so sorry, I wish I could do that for you, but I cannot.”

A trio of rings from the Seal & Scribe Love Letters collection, which could make for truly alternative engagement rings, or a message of love to yourself.

A decent proposal

Love Letters is Seal & Scribe’s first curated collection, and its first foray into engagement rings. To launch it, Cohen teamed with her friend Grace Lavarro, owner of the Los Angeles antique jewellery store Jewels by Grace. She is also the person responsible for convincing Cohen she was not just a collector with a brilliant eye, but had the potential to be a jewellery designer, pushing her to create Seal & Scribe and share her obsession with other jewellery lovers.

The friends spent a November weekend at the Hillsborough Antiques + Art + Design Show in San Mateo, California, with Seal & Scribe’s Love Letters rings showcased on the Jewels by Grace stand next to its antique wedding bands. The launch was a success, with nearly half the rings selling straight off – although not to any prospective brides.

This doesn’t bother Cohen at all, however. For her, while she believes her Love Letters would make for brilliant alternative engagement rings, the collection was always about love in the wider sense of the word.

“At first, I was rolling around with some ideas for the collection name that were more engagement or wedding kind of thing, and it didn’t sit right,” she says. “I don't want people to feel like ‘this is not for me’; they're for everybody. It's such a beautiful, expansive thing, all the different reasons that people could buy this. I love the idea that people were originally using these seals to send secret messages to their partners, and now people are using it in a completely different way.”

I Am Looking for the Most Faithful ring in 18ct yellow gold with yellow glass seal and diamonds in blackened silver settings.

Love in all its myriad forms

Some have bought Love Letters rings for themselves, others for loved ones. Each message takes on a different skew depending on its destination. A Love Letters ring with a yellow glass seal decorated with a cupid and the line Je cherche le plus fidèlle (I am looking for the most faithful) was admired not by a picky prospective spouse but by a single woman looking for love who wanted it as a reminder to herself not compromise during that search.

A mother felt drawn to a Love Letters ring with a red glass seal showing two hearts tied together beneath the words For Ever as a gift for her daughter who had just had twins.

The cupid and his message of choosing love? This was bought by a woman as a reminder that when in doubt, she should always choose love, above all else – a powerful sentiment she hopes to pass on to her daughter one day, as well as the Seal & Scribe Love Letters ring.

This article was written in partnership with Seal & Scribe