Butterfly Woman

She who has done the work and arrived in her fullness.

In Clarissa Pinkola Estés' Women Who Run With the Wolves, Butterfly Woman is not untouched — she is transformed. She has endured the descent, understood the wounding rather than merely survived it, and emerged not diminished but expanded into what she was always capable of being. Estés describes her as the figure of abundance in its most complete form: joy not as the absence of difficulty but as what remains when difficulty has been fully alchemized. She is vitality as a hard-won condition — a fullness that refused to let the wounding calcify into bitterness.

Butterfly Woman is a statement necklace in turquoise, magenta, and white — raw howlite slabs, carved magenta agate, milk quartz, antique Indian silver beads, and an openwork sunburst pendant in oxidized silver-tone. Lightweight, and generous in scale. Adjustable length. Finished in sterling silver findings.

Matching earrings available — shop the Butterfly Woman earrings here.

The Materials

Turquoise-dyed howlite slabs — raw, irregular, and unapologetically present. Howlite is a porous stone that takes color deeply; these slabs are not polished into submission. The natural matrix veining runs through each one differently. No two are the same.

Carved magenta agate — vivid, saturated, and already shaped by another hand before it arrived in this piece. Agate is one of the oldest talismanic stones across cultures, associated with vitality, courage, and grounding. The magenta here reads as pure life force — which is exactly the register of Butterfly Woman.

Milk quartz brings the white — opaque, calm, and grounding against the intensity of the turquoise and magenta.

The silver beads are the detail that elevates this piece. Sourced from an antique shop and originating in India, each one is similar in shape but distinct in its ornament — different surface patterns, different histories, the same visual weight. They are not a matched set. They are a curated collection of objects that happen to share a strand.

The pendant is a repurposed vintage find in oxidized silver-tone — an elongated fan shape in openwork metal, with a geometric sunburst radiating from the center outward to the frame. The design is precise and ceremonial; light passes through the openwork and changes how it reads against the skin. Two silver spikes flank the magenta agate bead above it — a construction detail that frames the drop and gives the whole pendant assembly its edge.