People don’t realise how absurdly difficult it is to find silver hoop earrings. They tend to be either tragically basic or aggressively “statement”, threatening to dislodge a lobe. So when I stumbled across Laila El Mehelmy’s molten, slightly off-kilter, seed-like hoops, it felt exquisitely apropos. Tactile, a little strange and instantly captivating.
Restraint like this is hard-earned. Mehelmy trained as a metalsmith, but her instincts lean sculptural, even philosophical. Raised between Jeddah and Cairo and now based in Amsterdam, her path to jewellery wasn’t a pivot so much as a distillation. Industrial design felt impersonal; sculpture, too inert. Jewellery offered intimacy, tactility and scale: metal that lives on the body, shaped by time. At the Rhode Island School of Design, she learnt the rules. In artist studios across New York and, for a brief period, repairing baubles for London jeweller Stephen Webster, she learnt how to break them.
A sultry brunette, Mehelmy exudes an assertive yet relaxed energy, radiating a warm coastal vibe despite her chillier Dutch surroundings. “I grew up in Jeddah, where my mother is from, so I’m a total sea baby. Water and nature are where I feel most at home,’’ she explains. Like many third-culture adults navigating life abroad, she feels a strong pull to her roots. “Nature is probably my greatest inspiration – palm trees from my aunt’s garden in Egypt, corals in the sea,
tree roots. They’re the lungs of the world, intertwined to make the world beat and breathe.”
Her pieces speak a gritty language of their own with root-like coils, warped hoops, tentacle strand forms that feel half-excavated, half-evolved. “I like to show the hand that made them,” she says. “They’re left intentionally unfinished for the wearer to morph into.” The Sprout hoops resemble seedlings just beginning to unfurl – viscerally, always in conversation…
