NAME Zena Haddad
AGE 45
HOMETOWN Beirut, Lebanon, where Ms. Haddad lived for the first three months of her life, and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, where she grew up until she left for a British boarding school at the age of 9.
NOW LIVES In the Mayfair neighborhood of London.
BACKGROUND Ms. Haddad took a dramatic detour on her way to jewelry-making. “I spent 20 years in law,” she said. “Being a Libra, I’m obsessed with ideals of justice and serving the underdog. And I’m a big reader. I spent my youth entangled in stories about people who’d been hard done by.”
A personalized signet ring sculpted from sandblasted rock crystal.
In 2012, Ms. Haddad finished a case that took about five years to come to trial, but the outcome was deeply disappointing: Her 84-year-old client was sentenced to jail time.
A cross made from lapis lazuli and set with yellow sapphires.
“I looked back at what I’d done and thought, ‘What had I really accomplished?’ ” she recalled. “I’d been there to hold people’s hands along very tricky journeys, but I didn’t feel I had contributed. At the beginning of 2015, I started taking a gemology course at the Gemmological Association of Great Britain a few nights a week, thinking perhaps I just needed something light to lift my morale. Soon, I realized I’d never been happier.”
BIG BREAK Shortly after earning her F.G.A. — Fellow of the Gemmological Association — diploma in June 2016, Ms. Haddad abandoned law for good. She sought to nurture the design sensibility that her parents, both jewelry lovers, had instilled in her as a teenager. But she struggled to find a good lapidary to transform her vision of “a beautiful emerald floating in a sea of rock crystal” into a luxe ring.
She eventually found a Belgian lapidary in the Hatton Garden area of London to execute the piece, which featured a 6.41-carat emerald set in an octagonal bezel of 18-karat yellow gold on a pedestal of rock crystal. She named the piece On the Rocks, and entered it in the 2018 Goldsmiths’ Craft and Design Council Awards competition in Britain. “It won silver in the modeler’s category for its craftsmanship,” Ms. Haddad said.
CURRENT PROJECT Ms. Haddad’s debut Rock Star collection is an ode to jewelry’s role as talisman. Designed with numerological significance, the line’s staples include hexagonal stacking rings studded with gem accents; an 18-karat gold chain of hexagonal and marquise-shaped links; crosses fashioned from hard stones such as lapis lazuli, malachite and turquoise and strung on 18-karat gold chains; and a signet ring, much like her award-winning On the Rocks, featuring a shank sculpted from sandblasted rock crystal and personalized with a letter or symbol. (“I’ve put a Z on mine,” Ms. Haddad said.)
LASTING INSPIRATION “I’m obsessed with numbers,” said Ms. Haddad, a numerology junkie. “My life path number is an eight, my soul number is a six. Every time I look at the clock, it’s 11:11 or 22:22. It’s like a dark abyss: Once you look into it, you can’t get out.”
