Boucheron’s Carte Blanche Tattoo Necklace Has 580 Carats of Quartz

Claire Choisne is a bit of a rock star on the Place Vendôme. As creative director of Boucheron, she has garnered a fan base justifiably in awe of her wildly nonconformist approach to high jewelry. For the maison’s annual Carte Blanche collection, she has created everything from a pendant crafted in Aerogel—a substance NASA deploys to insulate the Mars Exploration Rover and capture stardust—to a necklace that uses mathematical algorithms to suspend diamonds in a cloudlike structure reminiscent of an Elizabethan ruff.

Comparatively, this year’s inspiration may seem almost old-fashioned. Victorian-era tattoos were the reference for the glyptic technique employed to produce this necklace. Its bas-relief forms appear encapsulated in rock crystal, like fossils frozen in amber.

Each stone’s etching is intricately carved on the reverse side. It may sound like standard jewelry engraving, but quartz is incredibly hard, requiring the craftsmen to manufacture more than 200 tools—tailored to each detail—to realize the designs, some of which had to be remodeled as they wore down throughout the process.

Using 580 carats of smoky quartz, it permanently preserves many of founder Frédéric Boucheron’s archival nature themes from poppies, roses, and foliage to cicadas, snakes, chickadees, and butterflies. “For this masterpiece, I envisioned a tattoo written in light, where motifs from our heritage seem to emerge directly onto the skin,” Choisne tells Robb Report. It took 3,220 hours to complete this work of art, which is punctuated with a 1.74-carat D VVS1 troidia-cut diamond and pavé diamonds set in 18-karat white gold.

Monsieur Boucheron could hardly have imagined the evolution of high jewelry today. Yet like his modern counterpart, Choisne, he was a trailblazer during his era. The first jeweler to open a shop on the Place Vendôme, he dreamed up designs—such as the hooklike structure of his famous Question Mark necklace—that were thoroughly avant-garde in the 19th century. Bringing to life the 168 years of the house’s innovation, an immersive exhibition—Boucheron: In Focus—A Monograph of a Visionary, running from October 9 to 18 in collaboration with Christie’s New York—will display jewels spanning the company’s history, including this necklace and other pieces from the new Carte Blanche collection. It will, no doubt, illustrate that the best ideas are born from an ability to see the world through a different lens.