A handful of metals including precious metals like platinum, palladium, and silver merge together in Niellium to create an extraordinary, mystically black precious alloy that doesn’t alter when exposed to air and is not coated or surface treated.

For some time hardly anybody could manage to shape and form this extremely appealing but endlessly capricious material into a piece of jewelry. During a year-long research program, ATELIER ALLURE developed and refined various complex processing techniques in order to finally tame, form, hammer, and develop this black metal into its full splendor.

Black stands for the absence of all colors, and also for the disappearance of light. But since the eye is sun-like, it can never fully perceive pure blackness.

This is why we often mistake the darkest possible grey for true black, and in this sense the mysterious material becomes a metaphor of our search for something that is never fully tangible.

Within the realm of jewelry, in which light’s reflections and refractions play a central role, Niellium stands in contrast as a magnificent antithesis in which from now on the shadow acquires its rightful place. Allowed to develop its magic, it pulls the viewer into the depths. Much like Tanizaki Jun’ichiro who admires the “intrinsic beauty of shadows” in his famous analysis of Japanese aesthetics “In Praise of Shadows.”

choreutai