- Couples, friends, and pet owners are sharing their DIY beaded bracelets on TikTok and Instagram Reels.
- The carefully selected beads in each bracelet match the eye color of your loved one.
- This trend reflects the sentiment and imagery of Georgia’s “lover’s eyes” jewelry.
If you stumble across the song “Trees and Flowers” by ’80s group Strawberry Switchblade on TikTok or Instagram Reels, you’ll see a ton of beaded bracelets staring back at you, literally.
A recent trend is couples, friends, and pet owners taking cues from each other’s eyes to create DIY summer accessories of their choosing.
Some of the most popular videos have garnered more than 1 million likes and 15 million views on Instagram and TikTok.
And whether their creators know it or not, they also play into a rich history of eye-related affection.
The trend starts with beads that match the color of your loved one’s eyes
This modern trend starts at the craft store, where creators hunt around for beads that most closely match their loved one’s eye color, a step that comes with varying degrees of success.
But some beads are amazingly well-matched, reflecting your chosen eye, down to the color undertones and tiny specks.
They’re then strung together with string. In the finished piece, you might see a couple alternating green and blue eye beads, or a pet owner incorporating their pet’s eye color into the jewelry string.
After all, wearing someone’s eye color is even more personal and less noticeable than wearing their initials.
Anne Bos, antique jewelry dealer and owner of 21st Finds, says knowing the intimate details of someone’s eye color is a sign of a deep, intimate connection.
“Knowing someone well enough to know their eye color is a sign of a personal connection,” she told BI. “For example, I know my husband’s eye color very well, but I don’t know my neighbor’s eye color, even though we talk frequently.”
Gen Z isn’t the first generation to incorporate eyes into jewelry
Images of eyes have been incorporated into jewelry for thousands of years.
However, the style and emotion behind this contemporary affair is particularly reminiscent of Georgian eye miniatures, which later came to be called “lover’s eyes”.
“These were sentimental pieces of jewelry, created with the idea that a person’s eyes communicated something intimate and very personal about that person,” said Graham Becher, an art historian and co-author of “A Lover’s Eyes: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection.”
Rubber’s eye became especially popular in the late 18th century.
Because social conventions of the time often separated young people from potential romantic partners, Bosch portrays the gaze as far more intimate and powerful.
You might be best known for this style from the series Bridgerton and its spinoff Princess Charlotte, but the myth of lover’s eye jewelry is rooted in the complicated love story between Princess Charlotte and George III’s son, the future George IV.
George, then Prince of Wales, was infatuated with a woman named Maria Fitzherbert, a royal romance that was controversial at the time because Fitzherbert was twice widowed and a Catholic.
According to the story, George continued to pursue her and confessed his love by sending her a miniature portrait of his own eyes.
Boss said that a portrait of George’s eyes was considered much more romantic and intimate than a full-body portrait, and it seemed to work: Maria eventually became George’s longtime companion.
After the royal family’s big move, rubber eyes became an even bigger trend.
“I would go to a miniature artist and say, ‘I want to give my wife or my mistress an eye,'” Boettcher told the business magazine. “I was ordering both men and women.”
According to Boss, lovers’ eyes remained large for about 50 years, until the invention of photography.
The beauty of current and past trends is that they can be secrets to those who wear them.
Lovers’ eyes were sometimes worn exposed, as in bracelets or brooches, sometimes hidden within layers of clothing, and sometimes hidden inside lockets.
Either way, part of the jewel’s appeal is that the identity of the eye was a secret between the person and the wearer, or, as Becher adds, an open secret (as was the case with the Prince of Wales).
The fact that in Gen Z’s modern interpretation, the eye is “reduced to just eye color” adds an element of secrecy, even if it’s in public, since only the wearer knows who it refers to, Becher added.
Like the Georgian lovers’ eyes, modern bracelets are a physical bond to love and can also carry secrets (as long as videos showing how to make them don’t go viral).
