Snail Shell Protection in Metal Pomander Case

One of the things that I’ve noticed in high street fashion jewellery shops lately is the popularity of necklaces/pendants that are essentially a hollow ‘cage’ of some sort with a fancy bead sealed inside it. To those who are unfamiliar with the history of jewellery, these ‘cages’ were originally used in the medieval/renaissance period for people to carry fancy smelling things around with them – either to make themselves smell better or to hold up to their noses in order to prevent them from smelling too much of the sewage that lined the streets due to the bad sanitation of that time period.

So anyway, the really great thing about having a dad that loves to travel is that during high school, we got to visit a different place every summer. Given my love of the goddess Aphrodite (the official Greek version from their holy texts opposed to the popular modern myth version), one of my favourite holiday momentos is a white snail shell that I picked up on the beach at Cyprus when we went to check out Aphrodite’s rock.

After letting it sit in the bottom of my jewellery box gathering dust for a long time, I finally figured that I wanted to turn the shell into some sort of necklace. Originally I thought about doing something so that I could turn it into a pendant in the style of the gold one that Ursula wears in Disney’s The Little Mermaid.

After googling for a long time on how I could make this possible, I finally realized that I didn’t have the tools nor the skill to do this. So in the end I decided to settle on either using a spiral cage that you often see in new age shops that have gemstones inside or something in the style of a pomander case. 

The issue with getting my hands on a metal case is protecting the shell from getting chipped as it’s really thing. So it was off to lacquering it with several layers of my trusty clear nail varnish. This turned out to work pretty well, although I am a tad disappointed that I now can’t remove it from the cage and use it with something else, due to my mistake in not checking on how runny the nail varnish that I’d put inside the shell to solidify it a bit was, before I put the shell inside the case to check that it would fit.