Okay so the mirror check with a gold pendant is a very specific kind of insane where you tilt your chin down, then up, then you take a photo of yourself in the bathroom mirror at a weird angle for no reason, then you zoom in on the photo like the pendant is going to say something back to you. I’ve done this in probably nine different bathrooms this year. It’s not about the necklace being wrong, it’s about needing external validation that it’s right, which is a me problem, not a jewelry problem.
What it actually does though is genuinely unfair to plain outfits. Like I’ll have on the most boring gray tee situation, the kind of thing I wouldn’t post normally, and one pendant sitting right at the collarbone and suddenly it looks like I tried. Not tried hard.
Tried exactly the right amount. That’s the whole trick of this category, it’s doing decision making for you.
Under office lights mine goes kind of flat and yellow in a way that reads cheap even when it wasn’t, and in flash photos it either blows out into a little sun flare on my chest or disappears completely depending on the angle, there is no in between, I’ve never once gotten a normal, medium photo of it, it’s always dramatic or invisible.
Sent a photo to the group chat before I even left the house, one person said this is the one, one person said it looks like I’m going to a christening, and both were talking about the same necklace within a four minute window, so.
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And here’s the thing that keeps coming back around, we’ve had this fight before as a friend group without ever fully resolving it, about whether the pendant should sit high and choker-ish or low and kind of dangling, and it resurfaced hard when one of us bought a piece with a bigger charm that only works sitting low, because worn high it looked like it was strangling her a little, not cute, and worn at the right length it was suddenly the best thing she owns. Same exact necklace, completely different verdict, all length.
I will say the bigger, chunkier pendant is a gamble and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. On some people it’s the main character of the whole outfit. On me it looked like I raided somebody’s nightstand, I wore it exactly twice and it’s currently in a drawer I don’t open.
The compliment that actually settled it for me, someone at a coffee shop asked where it was from while I was mid order, not after, mid order, and I fumbled my whole sentence because I wasn’t expecting to defend a necklace before I’d even paid for my coffee. That’s the real test honestly, not the mirror, not the group chat. Whether a stranger interrupts your coffee order for it.
