Kendra Scott - Born to Shine: Do Good, Find Your Joy, and Build a Life You Love

I m an optimist to my core: my friends have joked that hanging out with me is like being around a Disney princess who has birds landing on her fingertips to sing her a song. Theyre wrong about the princess partIm Midwestern born, and Texas has been my home for thirty yearsbut I am one of those people who wakes up happy, who sees the best in everything and everyone. I live in the same reality we all dowhere bad things happen to good people, where dreams are deferred or crushed altogether, where climbing to a dizzying height means risking a painful fallI just refuse to let the worst of reality become my entire reality. Toxic Positivity is forcing a silver lining and denying the reality of the storm: its not just unhelpful, its harmful. Optimism, to me, is believing that whatever is in this moment is not forever. Its knowing that there is still possibility and promise in the future, even when the present is messy or painful or downright terrible.

Nature is the original optimist, and she gives us endless examples of promise and renewal and reinvention. My companyKendra Scottis known for creating beautiful and affordable jewelry, often with natural gemstones. Gemstones have an undeniable natural beauty that has captivated humanity for time immemorial; weve imbued them with meaning, with powers, weve valued them spiritually and materially.

One of our most popular stones is a form of quartz that dazzles like glitter, catching the light in a million different ways without ever being faceted. It can be cut to form earrings or pendants and dyed to nearly any color in the rainbow, and in any setting or shade, they would dazzle you even in a case filled with diamonds. But quartzlike any other gemstone, like diamonds, evendoes not start out beautiful. To create these quartz formations, mineralized water evaporates on the surface of a plain old rock, and with the right combination of ingredients, time, pressure, and space we get immense beauty.

Each gem is a product of its environment, a reflection on what came before it. Amethyst is formed in basalt, a rock created by volcanic lava. In the icy waters of Lake Superior, quartz can appear in earth-toned agates, striped with the history of the glaciers that formed the Great Lakes. Quartz formations can be found in old quarries and abandoned mines, a glittering reminder of the persistence of the natural world, who renews and reinvents herself over and over again.

Maybe this is what drew me to these elements in my work, that the stones I formed into necklaces and earrings for my friends, my neighbors, and now for millions of women worldwide reflect the same tenacity and perseverance as the people who treasure them. Often, the rarest of gems are more valued for what makes them different; an imperfection that cannot be replicated suddenly makes them even more special. What if we saw ourselves this way? Each other? What if we looked at our own lives and saw the flaws and cracks and imperfections as features wholly unique to us, assets that increased our value, that make us truly one of a kind.

Gemstones do not have to be rare to be beautiful or valued; quartz makes up a large percentage of our Earths crust and still we marvel at the way it catches and refracts light, how something so luminous could grow in a place the light never touches. By the time they reach us, we see only the finished product; these naturally beautiful objects dont reveal the immense amount of effort it took to form something so effortlessly beautiful.