Black stones

Black arrives in two forms here. There is the glossy round kind with nothing going on inside it — no banding, no inclusions, nothing to interpret — and there is the rough kind, left unpolished so it still has the grain it came out of the ground with. They get worn for opposite reasons.

The glossy ones earn their keep by never arguing. That is a dull thing to say about a piece and it is exactly why people buy them: it is the one thing on the chain that goes with whatever you already put on this morning, and it layers under other chains without fighting them.

The rough ones are about weight. Something heavy sitting against your chest is a physical fact before it is a symbolic one, and that is most of what people mean when they say a piece is grounding. Wire on a rough stone stays blunt on purpose — a few turns holding it down, not a cage trying to make it delicate.