Meenakari Work Set

It is enamelling on metal — an old Indian craft in which coloured glass, ground to a powder, is packed into recesses cut in the silver and fired in a kiln until it melts and fuses to the metal. The piece is then ground flush and polished, so the colour sits level with the silver rather than on top of it.

Each colour has its own melting point and has to be fired separately, hardest first, because every later firing would melt what came before. A piece carrying two colours has been through the kiln at least twice.

No. This is the real advantage of enamel over painted or lacquered colour: it is glass, chemically bonded into the metal, and glass does not fade in sunlight or lift at the edges. The turquoise will look the same in decades that it does now.

What enamel can do is chip, under a sharp knock against something hard. Treat it the way you would treat a glass bangle and it will outlast you.

Yes — this is sold as a set. The earrings carry the same turquoise and cobalt enamel and the same fringe of small silver drops as the centrepiece, so the two read as one piece of work rather than a necklace with earrings found to match.

It is a long necklace. The enamelled fans begin near the collarbone and step down both sides of the chest, and the chandbali centrepiece falls low, around the level of the bust. It is worn over the drape of a saree rather than against bare skin at the throat.

That length is what lets the graduation be seen. Shortened, the fans would bunch and the piece would lose its shape entirely.

Solid silk, and ideally a drape that gives the turquoise somewhere to land — a saree with green or blue in the border, or a plain one in cream, mustard, deep green, navy or black. The necklace carries two colours and a fringe already; a printed or heavily worked fabric turns it into noise.

Wear the matching earrings and nothing else at the ear, and keep the neck otherwise bare. At this length a second necklace sits exactly where the fans need to be seen.

A soft dry cloth, wiped gently, and nothing more. No silver dip, no ultrasonic cleaner, no polishing liquid — a dip strips the darkened recesses that make oxidised silver read as depth, and both a dip and an ultrasonic can craze or crack fired enamel.

If the silver dulls over years, bring it to us rather than to a high-street polisher. Enamelled work needs cleaning by hand, around the colour, never across it.