Chaumet’s ‘A Journey through Nature’: When Jewellery Becomes Sensation

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Chaumet describes A Journey through Nature as a tribute to the treasures the Maison “captures, preserves and magnifies.” In this new High Jewellery collection, however, preservation takes on a more elusive meaning. Across forty-six creations, Chaumet seeks to capture not only the forms and colours of plants, herbs and spices, but also the sensations they leave behind: freshness, sweetness, warmth, scent and memory.

Nature has long belonged to Chaumet’s creative vocabulary. Flowers, leaves, wheat, insects and wild plants have accompanied the Maison throughout its history, shaped by the botanical curiosity of Empress Joséphine and repeatedly revisited by the designers of 12 Vendôme. With A Journey through Nature, however, Chaumet moves beyond the visible.

Observation gives way to emotion. Nature becomes something to experience before it is something to recognise.

Comprising forty-six pieces, the collection unfolds as a triptych built around three sensations: Botanic Freshness, Spicy Sweetness and Aromatic Warmth. Each chapter brings together three parures, creating a gradual progression from crystalline greens and blues to softer, sweeter hues and, finally, to deeper colours and more assertive forms.  

Botanic freshness

The journey opens with lightness.

In the first chapter, Tea Field, Verbena Bouquet and Mint Leaf evoke the sharp, revitalising sensation of water, herbs and green leaves. Contrasting gemstones and fluid lines give this opening movement an almost tangy clarity.  

The Tea Field parure draws together two landscapes preserved in Chaumet’s archives: cascading water and terraced plantations. Its white-gold structure appears to flow downwards in overlapping diamond-set lines, ending in the saturated green of a Colombian emerald.

The necklace centres on an exceptional 23.81-carat emerald. Its sculptural construction required more than 1,400 hours of work, while individual diamonds were cut specifically to follow the contours of the design. Rather than depicting a literal tea leaf, the piece communicates the sensation of water moving through a landscape and the deep vegetal colour associated with tea.  

Movement also defines Verbena Bouquet, where Chaumet returns to one of its characteristic techniques: mesh. Here, however, the supple structure appears in yellow gold, a choice seldom seen in the Maison’s recent High Jewellery collections.

The open lattice is scattered with sapphires from Madagascar and Ceylon, individually selected for tones that move between pale yellow, green and touches of blue. Their delicate irregularity gives the necklace a light, dreamlike quality, as though drops of colour had settled upon an almost weightless golden net.  

With Mint Leaf, freshness becomes cooler and more architectural. Aquamarines and pearls bring together glacial blue and luminous white, while strict geometry meets organic curvature.

At the centre of the necklace is a 17.46-carat emerald-cut aquamarine. Its clarity and stepped facets recall both the surface and the edges of a swimming pool, while pearls rise along the diamond-set line like droplets suspended above water. The result is remarkably restrained: summer translated into volume, reflection and transparency.  

Spicy sweetness

The second chapter changes rhythm.

Vanilla Flower, Star Anise and Cinnamon Bark replace the sharpness of green notes with softer volumes and warmer colours. Chaumet compares this passage to the involuntary memory awakened by Proust’s madeleine: sensation becomes intimate, carrying associations that differ from one wearer to another. 

The most elaborate expression of this idea appears in Vanilla Flower. Across seven creations, the Maison transforms the blossoms and pods of the vanilla orchid into white gold, yellow gold and diamonds.

Its asymmetrical necklace winds around the neck in overlapping stems, flowers and ribbed pods before descending into a fluid diamond-set tassel. At its centre sits a 10.71-carat D-colour, flawless Type IIa diamond. Fifteen further diamonds, each weighing between approximately 0.30 and 0.90 carat, are integrated into the composition.

The piece required more than 1,350 hours of craftsmanship, particularly because of the challenge of articulating its different settings while preserving suppleness and movement.   The result balances delicacy with abundance: vanilla is suggested not only through the form of the plant but through the contrast between the softness of its fragrance and the intensity of its flavour.

Star Anise turns a familiar spice into a more graphic composition. Diamonds trace the radiating structure of its star-shaped fruits, while cushion-cut pink sapphires from Madagascar introduce colour and depth. In the brooch alone, six sapphires ranging from 1.87 to 2.32 carats form a cluster that feels botanical without becoming strictly representational. 

The palette deepens further in Cinnamon Bark. Rose gold, spessartite garnets and rubellites convey the spice’s reddish warmth, while rounded forms recall curled strips of bark.

The necklace centres on a 38.38-carat oval rubellite accompanied by an approximately two-carat diamond. Its voluminous, interlacing construction has a distinctly baroque character, setting it apart from the cooler precision of the opening chapter.  

Aromatic warmth

In the third and concluding chapter, the collection reaches its most intense register.

Coffee Aroma, Peppercorns and Saffron Flower are defined by deeper colour, stronger contrasts and a more pronounced sense of character. Chaumet describes this final passage as aromatic warmth: powerful, enveloping and persistent. 

In Coffee Aroma, oval openings and rounded gemstones suggest coffee beans, but the parure avoids a literal interpretation. Instead, white-gold curves twist and circulate around sapphires from Madagascar, evoking aroma as something invisible that expands through the air.

An oval 12.09-carat sapphire anchors the necklace, while the corresponding ring features an 8.79-carat stone. Their dark, luminous blue gives coffee an unexpected chromatic identity, replacing brown with a colour that conveys depth and concentration.  

Peppercorns strips the palette back to white gold and diamonds. The repeated round stones become grains scattered across airy structures, while several pieces revisit signatures closely associated with Chaumet, including the V-shaped aigrette and tiara-derived forms.

The necklace incorporates nineteen E-colour, VVS-clarity diamonds weighing between 0.30 and one carat, while the tiara brings together twenty-one diamonds in the same weight range. Monochrome and highly controlled, the parure represents the most recognisably Parisian expression of the collection.

Colour returns with force in Saffron Flower. Yellow diamonds translate the spice’s intense golden hue, while grand feu enamel and miniature painting introduce a rare richness of surface.

Among the creations are a 7.01-carat Fancy Intense Yellow diamond ring and a transformable ring centred on a 6.03-carat Fancy Intense Yellow diamond. Another brooch combines a 7.80-carat purple spinel from Ceylon with enamel and yellow and white diamonds, bringing together the violet flower and the vivid colour of its precious stigmas.  

The naturalist jeweller

The idea of the naturalist jeweller is deeply rooted at Chaumet. It connects Joséphine’s interest in botany with historic floral jewels, the Maison’s celebrated tiaras and more recent projects including La Nature de Chaumet, Le Jardin de Chaumet and Jewels by Nature. Exhibitions in Paris and Doha have also explored the place of the natural world in Chaumet’s work since 1780.  

Yet A Journey through Nature introduces a subtle shift. Its subject is not nature observed from a distance, but nature absorbed through the senses.

The gemstones remain exceptional, and the virtuosity of the ateliers is visible in every flexible structure, transformable element and specially cut diamond. But technique is placed at the service of perception.

The collection’s strongest identity lies precisely here. Emerald becomes freshness. Aquamarine becomes water. Rubellite becomes warmth. A curve in white gold carries the suggestion of an aroma moving through space.

A jewel may reproduce a flower, a seed or a leaf. A Journey through Nature asks whether it can also preserve the feeling they awaken.