Many of us have grown accustomed to buying jewelry for cheap - we click a piece that strikes our fancy into our Amazon cart, wear it for maybe a few months, then lose it in the recesses of our bathroom drawers.
Meaghan, founder of NYXA jewelry, believes jewelry should carry a little more weight. Using raw silver as a medium, she fashions pieces sturdy enough to carry people’s stories far into the future.
Founded in 2020, NYXA (pronounced ‘niksa’) began as a means of passing the time during quarantine. Meaghan, inspired by her partner, also a jeweler, began fashioning her own pieces as a means of moving anxiety and stress through her body. Working with her hands in this way stood in stark contrast to her prior work life.
“I’d spent a lot of time working remotely, before remote work was even a thing,” she explained. Over time, she’d grown isolated and burnt out on working in the intangible. Jewelry making was the opposite.
Monada Earrings and Monada Necklace—hand-forged from sterling silver and set with turquoise, these geometric pieces channel myth, movement, and clarity.
Her first piece was an ace of spades earring, made for a queer poker group she runs. It functioned as a subtle flag, a way for members of a community to recognize one another in the outside world. That idea - meaning encoded into an accessory - would become central to NYXA’s ethos.
To hone her craft, she started frequenting a predominantly queer hacker house. There, she learned to use a laser cutter, then a 3D printer, and started combining more traditional techniques with these new technologies.
Over time, her newfound passion calcified into NYXA, a name inspired by the Greek primordial deity Nyx - creator of the cosmos and night, born of chaos. To Meaghan, the name spoke to how many people felt throughout the COVID era: uncertain, unmoored. Everything was upside down and chaotic; no one knew when, or even if, things would get back to normal. Jewelry had been Meaghan’s way out of that darkness.
NYXA at work
@nyxa.co From studio to street — crafted with fire, forged with purpose. Every piece begins here: in the heat, in the hands, in the heart of the p... See more
"You could take that energy and sit in that anxiety and let it swallow you, or you could see it as a blank slate to start something completely new."
Just like jewelry making helped Meaghan channel her own anxiety into something beautiful, she began to see jewelry itself as a vessel for meaning. People don’t generally buy precious jewelry on a whim; they buy it to mark important moments in their lives - engagements, divorces, and other moments that matter. She therefore set out to make jewelry sturdy enough to hold that kind of weight.
"It should be something like a memento, something that…has some sort of significance of what's happening in that moment in your life. Almost like a tattoo.”
Rather than trying to keep up with a trend cycle moving at breakneck speeds, Meaghan designs what she calls ‘future artifacts’ - creations made to last, to be passed down from one generation to the next, to be found by great-grandchildren in a box crammed into the back of their attic. She hopes her pieces might even tell those future someones something about their original wearers.
One early example: a jagged ring reminiscent of a sidewalk split by an earthquake. Meaghan calls it the Chasm ring. She didn't design it with any particular meaning in mind, but once she released it, customers started asking if she made "divorce rings."
"I didn't necessarily have that meaning in mind when I made it, but it makes sense," she said. The ring had found its purpose through its wearers.
Because she wants her pieces to have staying power, Meaghan works exclusively with silver. Plated or base metals, whilst cheaper and more accessible, fade and tarnish with time. Silver is permanent.
“It's a store of value. It has significance, and it's not going to be a throwaway piece of jewelry.”
Also important to Meaghan is allowing people to imbue her pieces with their own meaning. Part of that is allowing people to shed binary ideas about men’s versus women’s fashion.
"Silver inherently doesn't have a gender. It's just a metal. So if you just put stuff out there, then it's a choose-your-own-adventure."
For Meaghan, genderlessness comes down to size inclusivity, not design. She might, for example, take something traditionally feminine (a thin band adorned with a gemstone, perhaps) and put it out in a size 13.
“If it fits you, and you like it. That's great. It's your ring now, you know?”
Meaghan loves designing jewelry, but she also loves watching people interact with her creations. Today, she vends at iconic SF festivals like Breakfast of Champions and the Edwardian Ball, and her pieces are stocked at Wild Feather on Haight Street and Local Take in the Castro.
You can also find your future artifacts at NYXA.co
