The Jaipur Ring
$75
Wide band ring in recycled brass with hand-painted blue enamel floral inlay in traditional meenakari style.
Materials
Recycled brass, blue enamel inlay, traditional meenakari technique
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Why Liz Chose It
“That impossible cobalt stopped me cold in Jaipur's old city. Priya paints every petal with a single squirrel hair, and I wear it to remind myself that patience is the rarest luxury of all.”
— Elizabeth Groch, Founder
The Story of This Piece
The Jaipur Ring is a miniature masterpiece of meenakari — the ancient art of enamel painting on metal that has been practiced in Rajasthan for over four hundred years. Originally reserved for royal courts and Mughal emperors, meenakari was the art of the privileged. Today, it survives in the narrow lanes of Jaipur's old city, kept alive by artisans who refuse to let it die.
The cobalt blue enamel is mixed and applied by hand — each petal of the floral design is painted with a single-hair brush, then fired in a small kiln until the enamel fuses with the metal. The process is unforgiving: one wrong stroke, one degree too hot, and hours of work are destroyed.
The brass itself is recycled — melted down from old hardware, broken fixtures, and discarded objects. In Priya's workshop, nothing is wasted. The result is a ring that carries both the weight of history and the lightness of reinvention.
The Artisan
Priya Sharma
Age 27 · Jaipur old city, India
Priya Sharma is the youngest daughter of a meenakari master who spent forty years painting enamel for Jaipur's luxury jewelry houses. When her father's eyesight began to fail, Priya — then nineteen and studying economics at university — dropped out to learn the craft before it was lost.
She spent three years as her father's apprentice, mastering the painstaking technique of applying enamel with brushes made from individual squirrel hairs. But Priya brought something new to the tradition: a design sensibility shaped by Instagram, contemporary art, and a conviction that meenakari should be accessible, not just aspirational.
At 27, Priya runs a small workshop in her family's ancestral home in Jaipur's old city. She has trained four young women in the art — all of them from families with no connection to the craft. She sells her work through Dens of Thieves and a handful of other ethical retailers, and she is slowly building a following on social media where she documents her process in hypnotic time-lapse videos.