Hidden Connectors: A hidden jewelry technique

Most of us just enjoy wearing and looking at jewelry, and seldom stop to think about the artistry and work behind it, or the techniques and experience required to design and create beautiful jewelry. Yet, jewelry is an art with special tools, special terminology, and special techniques all its own. One very special jewelry technique involves making the connectors that join the different parts in a piece of jewelry “invisible”.

These “invisible” connectors, as the name suggests, are hidden; we can’t see them connecting the different parts of the jewelry, but they are there just the same.

The fact that we can’t see these connectors is not the only reason they are hidden, though. Jeweler’s typically have their own techniques for creating hidden jewelry connectors, and they often have to engineer them anew for each new piece of jewelry, making the technique almost proprietary. In fact, jewelers are often reluctant to share the process they’ve developed for creating hidden connectors.

The best way to learn about them is to study antique jewelry. Goldsmiths from the past excelled at creating hidden connectors and there are many beautiful examples of antique jewelry that use hidden connectors in their design. Today, we see hidden connectors used primarily by fine jewelry companies such as Van Cleef and Arpels, Tiffany, Cartier etc.

You can also examine our jewelry project below where we designed and produced a model of an earring with seven links using invisible connectors. Since the links are quite small, we had to use the sprue in such a way that it could be used as a handle during the cleaning and polishing stage. Thus, before the parts were detached from the sprues, they were almost all polished. We then connected the links by using small pins. Finally, after they were soldered together, we removed excess material so that the connectors would not be visible at all. The result is the pair of earrings you see below: