People ask me how I choose colors. The honest answer is: color usually chooses me first.
But that's not the whole answer. There's an instinct layer, a craft layer, and something underneath both of them that I've only recently started to put into words. So let me try.
Layer One: How Color Finds Me
I love blue. I say this constantly and naturally, without thinking about it, because it's simply true. Blue is where I live. Not one blue — all of them. The blue-sea green that exists between aqua and sage and has no real name. Duke blue, which feels like identity and loyalty and something that doesn't need to explain itself. The pale sky blue that asks nothing of you and gives you everything. Cobalt, which is a statement.
When I'm at a bead show or scrolling through a vendor's inventory, blue stops me first. Always. I don't decide to look at it. I'm just already looking.
Pink is newer. For a long time I didn't reach for it — it wasn't my color, or so I thought. And then I started noticing what happened when I put a rose glass bead next to something earthy, or when a soft blush showed up in a pearl strand I'd bought for something else entirely. Pink kept being right in ways I hadn't expected. It's growing on me, which is its own kind of design education: learning to work beyond your own preferences because the bead in your hand knows something you don't yet.
That's the thing about color instinct. It's not just about what you love. It's about what you notice. I respond to color in the bead bowl before I know what I'll do with it — before there's a design, before there's a wire, before there's a plan. Something catches. I pick it up. The rest follows.
And then there are the colors I buy anyway because my customers need them. Warm neutrals. Certain reds. Colors that aren't mine but belong in the shop because they belong on someone else's wrist. Part of designing for other people is learning to hold your own preferences loosely enough to make room for theirs. I try not to let my color biases rule my wire.
Layer Two: How I Pair Colors on the Wire
Once the beads are in front of me, the question changes. It's no longer what do I love — it's what does this focal bead need.
The focal bead's color dictates everything around it. Not suggests — dictates. When I was designing around the amethyst, the first attempt failed because I added more purple. The stone disappeared into its own color. What it needed was contrast — something that would make the purple more itself by putting something different beside it. The recycled paper beads with their white canvas and purple stripe gave the amethyst room to be the amethyst.
Contrast and harmony pull in different directions, and knowing which one a piece needs is mostly feel. Cobalt and amethyst together is contrast — two strong colors that don't blend, they argue, and the argument is interesting. Blue-sea green and white is harmony — colors that belong to the same emotional world, moving together like water and light.
Neutrals are underrated. White jade, silver, clear crystal — these aren't filler. They're breathing room. A strong color next to a neutral gets to be fully itself. Without that space, even beautiful colors can crowd each other into noise.
And sometimes I break my own rules and it works anyway. A combination that shouldn't resolve — rose, green, and orange — turns out to be the most completely harmonious thing on the mat. The rules are useful until they're not. The bead usually knows before I do.
Layer Three: Color as Emotional Language
This is the layer I find hardest to talk about and most important to get right.
Color isn't just aesthetics. It's feeling. And when I'm designing, I'm not just asking does this look good — I'm asking what does this feel like to wear.
Blue-sea green and white feels like the ocean. Not like a picture of the ocean — like the actual sensation of standing at the edge of something vast and quiet and being okay with how small you are. That's what I want someone to feel when they put on the Calm by the Sea bracelet. The color is doing that work.
Duke blue feels like identity and loyalty. It's the color you wear when you know who you are and you're not apologizing for it. There's a confidence in it that doesn't need to announce itself.
Fuchsia feels like joy that doesn't ask permission. It's not a subtle color and it's not trying to be. It shows up fully and it expects you to meet it there.
Purple feels contemplative. Green feels grounded. Rose feels tender. Black feels like authority worn quietly.
None of this is universal — color meaning is personal and cultural and shifts with context. But when I'm designing, I'm working from my own emotional vocabulary, and I'm trusting that it will resonate with someone whose vocabulary overlaps with mine. That's the whole bet of making something and putting it in the world.
Color finds me. I respond to it. I build around it.
And somewhere in that process, a bracelet becomes itself — brilliant, bold, and always.