A Small Complaint About "Waterproof Jewelry"
I have a small complaint. It’s about the phrase waterproof jewelry.
Not because I think everyone should wear fine jewelry. I love vintage costume jewelry and fashion jewelry and pieces made from unexpected materials.
But I hate it when jewelry is marketed as waterproof.
We wash our hands. We sweat. We get caught in the rain. We forget to take our rings off before gardening or washing dishes. Jewelry is one of the few objects we expect to live in constant contact with the human body. That feels like part of the design brief.
“Waterproof” isn’t really describing what jewelry is. It’s describing what consumers have come to expect it might not be.
For thousands of years, metals have been prized because they’re remarkably resilient. Gold, silver, and platinum aren’t precious because they’re delicate. They’re precious because they endure. They can be scratched, polished, repaired, melted down, reshaped, and worn again - lived in.
That doesn’t mean every piece of jewelry needs to be made from precious metals. There are good reasons to choose brass, steel, aluminum, resin, wood, ceramics, textiles, whatever. Different materials have different personalities, different price points, and different purposes. A pair of vintage earrings doesn’t have to become an heirloom to be successful.
But I do think it’s important to talk about materials honestly.
If a piece is gold-plated over brass, that’s useful information. If it’s sterling silver, wonderful. If it’s stainless steel with a heavy PVD coating, great. Those materials all behave differently, and that’s not a flaw— it’s simply part of understanding what you’re buying.
I get that it’s shorthand for “this won’t turn your neck green,” but I think we can do better than celebrating “waterproof” as though surviving a jump in the pool is the pinnacle of material engineering.
One of my favorite things about precious metals is that they don’t resist being worn. Gold develops a soft patina over time. Silver tarnishes and brightens again after a quick polish. Platinum accumulates tiny marks that quietly tell the story of decades of wear. They’re not deteriorating, but changing alongside the person wearing them.
I tend to wear the same necklaces almost every day. While I know that I should take them off to sleep, or at least before swimming, I rarely do. (Don’t be like me. Read our Care Guide for better advice.)
[Case in point, I recently got to swim in this beautiful lake, in all my jewelry.]
Every so often I clean them, they’re bright again, and then they go back to collecting the ordinary evidence of a life being lived.
I guess that’s what bothers me about the term waterproof jewelry. It implies that jewelry is something that will resist being worn. The best jewelry lives in concert with the person wearing it. It gets covered in sunscreen and flour and dirt. It gets cleaned, repaired, passed down, reimagined, and worn again.