Evil Eye Jewelry (Mal de Ojo)

Literally, the bad eye. In Spanish the phrase names a folk concept — the idea that an envious or covetous look carries consequences — rather than naming an object.

The same concept is recorded under different names in Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and South Asian traditions, which is why the phrase translates so readily.

The eye design is the visual motif associated with the concept, and in Spanish it is often called ojo turco, the Turkish eye, to distinguish the object from the idea.

Very old. Concentric eye designs appear on glass beads and pottery from the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia dating back several thousand years.

Eye imagery is also a fixture of Egyptian and Phoenician decorative work, and the concentric form used in jewelry today is recognisably descended from those objects.

Few decorative motifs have stayed in continuous production for so long without substantially changing shape. The arrangement of pupil, ring and outer field has held steady while the materials carrying it — glass, ceramic, enamel, gold — changed entirely.

The convention comes from how the earliest beads were made. Cobalt was the colourant available to Mesopotamian and Egyptian glassmakers, so the matrix was blue, and blue glass was itself a prestige material.

The white ring and dark centre came from the technique: layers of molten glass laid one on another and flattened while soft.

A manufacturing signature hardened into a convention, and by the time the design moved into gold and enamel the colours were settled.

The eye is a concentric circular motif. The hamsa is an open palm with the fingers shown, a distinct form found across North Africa and the Middle East.

The two are frequently combined, with an eye placed at the centre of the palm, which is why they are often treated as one design in jewelry.

They come from overlapping but separate traditions, and in Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities across the region both are long established.

Azabache is jet: a black, very lightweight material formed from fossilised wood, which takes a high polish and has been carved for ornament since antiquity.

In Puerto Rican, Dominican, Spanish and wider Caribbean practice a small hand carved from jet, la mano de azabache, is a familiar form, usually mounted in gold.

Jet is soft compared with gemstones and scratches easily, which is why it is normally enclosed in a gold mount rather than left exposed.

It is documented around the Mediterranean — Greece, Turkey, southern Europe, Iberia — and through the Levant, North Africa, Iran and South Asia.

Spanish and Portuguese settlement carried it into Latin America and the Caribbean, where it merged with local practice and acquired its Spanish names.

The distribution is unusually wide for a single design, and the regional forms differ considerably even where the underlying motif is the same.

Three ways. Enamel fuses powdered glass to the metal in a kiln, giving flat saturated colour in the concentric bands the design needs.

Set stones build the same rings from separate materials — a blue stone for the field, a colourless stone for the ring, a dark centre — which gives depth rather than flatness.

All-gold versions cut or apply the bands in metal alone, with no colour, which is the most robust of the three on a ring.

It can. Enamel is glass, so its hardness is in the range of glass, and a sharp impact against a hard edge can take a chip out of it.

Well-made pieces set the enamel below a raised rim of metal, so the gold takes the contact before the enamel does. That detail matters more on a ring than on a pendant.

Enamel does not fade or wear off the way a surface coating would, since it is fused to the metal rather than applied over it.

No. It predates the religions now practised across the regions where it is found, and it is used by Muslim, Jewish, Christian and secular families alike.

That is one reason it travels so easily: it is a cultural motif rather than a confessional one, and it carries no denominational statement.

Many people today wear it purely as a graphic design, and that has long been one of the ordinary ways it is worn.

It is a customary gift at a birth across several of these cultures, usually from a grandmother or godmother, and the custom is widely observed.

It is traditionally pinned to a blanket or fastened to a crib rather than worn, and a bracelet in the same motif is often given at a first birthday instead.

Anything given for an infant should be placed well out of reach rather than worn on the body, whatever the material.