I do love to carve these fantastic insects! This is another iteration of the Death’s Head Hawkmoth-inspired Memento Mori, this time set with a warm palette of fancy-color diamonds with fancy-shaped cuts along the wing edges and abdomen. The thorax is of course set with a Tahitian keshi pearl carved as a skull. 18K.

The backside has a classic Latin message we should all take to heart: Carpe the Fucking Diem. (With a little diamond in the Fucking ‘i’)

Carving skulls out of keshi pearls is so fun–I like to let the shape of the baroque pearl lend some personality to each skull.

Keshi is a type of pearl that is mostly nacre (the pearly coating that an oyster covers foreign objects with). They are created after a nucleated pearl is removed from the oyster (nucleated with a round bead to create a round pearl), and the oyster is put back into the ocean. The area where the nucleated pearl used to be is still irritated and producing nacre so it starts to collect around maybe a little bit of tissue, forming an irregular shaped pearl after a while.

It was hard to get a good shot in my photo booth that really showed the colors in the diamonds because of the light placement wanting to reflect off the tables. Outside in more diffuse daylight I was able to get a better shot of the diamonds, if not my dry hands..