I've been asked, more times than I expected, what bracelet I wear. The honest answer is that I barely wear any of my own pieces, and I want to explain why — because I think it reveals something about the maker's relationship to the made thing, and because it's the kind of small honesty that I owe wearers who've assumed I'm walking around in three of my own bracelets.

What's on my wrist, today

If you saw me in the studio today, you'd see two things on my left wrist. The first is a thin gold band — my grandmother's wedding ring, which I wear on my wrist because it's too small for my finger. The second is a single SENMOMO piece: not one of our signature designs, but a small prototype I made early in 2024, before piece #001. It has no archive number. It has five beads — rose quartz, two pearls, a moonstone, and one bead of carnelian that I never ended up using in any production piece. It exists only on my wrist.

That's it. No Her Tenderness. No April Rain. No Slow Sunday. The bracelets I make for others are not the bracelets I wear myself.

Why I don't wear my own production pieces

The honest reason is twofold, and both reasons are simple.

First: the pieces I make for wearers are made for them, not for me. When I assemble Her Tenderness, I'm picking stones that fit the wearer's relationship to softness — not mine. When I make Quiet Strength, I'm building for someone else's particular kind of resolve. To wear one of those pieces myself would be like wearing a letter someone else wrote. The bracelet's address is in the design. It's not addressed to me.

Second: I'm in the studio nine hours a day, six days a week, surrounded by every piece I've ever made. They're in the archive. They're in the trays. I see them constantly. By the time a piece leaves the studio, I've held every bead in it, photographed it, written about it. The relationship I have to each SENMOMO piece is more saturated than any wearer's. To wear one would be — for me — like a chef eating their own cooking every meal. Possible. But not particularly satisfying.

So I wear something else. A grandmother's wedding ring. A prototype that's not for sale. A piece that exists outside the system.

My grandmother's ring

She died in 2019, six years before SENMOMO existed. She was small and quiet and had been a schoolteacher in a coastal town in Guangdong for forty years. When she died, my mother gave me her wedding ring — a thin gold band engraved with my grandfather's initials and the date of their wedding (1956). The ring is too small for any of my fingers, so I wear it on a thin gold chain around my wrist, with a small clasp.

I wear it constantly. I've worn it for six years. Sometimes I forget it's there until I'm washing my hands. Sometimes I look at it and remember her exactly — the kitchen, the specific tea she made, the way she put her hand on my arm when she said something serious.

I think wearing it constantly is why I started SENMOMO. Not consciously, but: every day, I was carrying around an object that meant something specific because of who it came from. And I noticed — slowly, over years — that almost nothing else I owned had that quality. The objects I'd bought new were generic. The objects I'd inherited had history.

SENMOMO is, in some sense, my attempt to make objects that start out as the second category. Pieces that have history from the day they're made. Pieces that mean something specific because of who they were made for and who made them.

The grandmother's ring is the reference point. Every piece I make is, in a small way, an attempt to make something that could one day be that — a thin gold band on someone's wrist that means them, exactly.

The prototype

The other piece I wear was the first thing I made that felt like a real composition, not just a string of beads. I made it in March 2024 — three months before piece #001. It was for me, to figure out whether I could do this. I picked five stones essentially at random from what I had: a pale rose quartz, two small freshwater pearls, a moonstone, and one carnelian.

It's not balanced. The carnelian doesn't fit the others. The proportions are wrong; one bead is noticeably smaller than the rest. By any standard I'd apply to a SENMOMO piece today, this would not pass review. mo would reject it.

I wear it anyway, every day, on the same wrist as the ring. I wear it because it's the piece that told me I could do the work — proof in the form of an imperfect physical object that I made one thing, and the next thing I made could be better. It's the only piece in the studio I won't repair, won't re-string, won't change. It's the first object. It will stay the way it is until it falls apart, and then I'll wear the pieces of it.

It has no archive number on purpose. The numbering begins with the first piece I made for someone else. The piece I made for myself doesn't count.

What this means about being a maker

I think there's a small confusion built into a lot of designer brands. The designer is the icon — Tom Ford, Coco Chanel, Phoebe Philo — and we imagine that they walk around wearing their own work as a kind of advertisement. Sometimes they do. Often they don't. Designers I've talked to in jewelry specifically often wear inherited pieces, prototypes, things they made twenty years ago and have grown attached to. The current collection is for the customer.

I want to be open about this for SENMOMO wearers. If you write to ask whether I wear my own pieces, and I say "not really" — please don't read it as a rejection of what I make. Read it as the maker's particular relationship to the made thing.

The bracelet I made for you isn't worse because I don't wear it. It might be better, actually. It's saturated with attention specifically for you. I'm in the studio precisely because I want every piece to have that quality — and the only way to maintain that quality at scale is to hold the work I do for you separate from the work I keep for myself.

What I might wear, one day

There's one circumstance where I'd wear a piece from our production catalog: if a piece came back home for service from a wearer who had passed away, and the wearer's family asked us to keep it (some do, when there's no obvious inheritor). In those cases I might wear that piece for a while, in the way you wear a friend's jacket — keeping it warm, remembering them. I wouldn't pretend it was made for me. I'd just give it the use it was made to have.

This has happened twice. I've worn each piece for a few weeks before re-archiving them in a small dedicated drawer at the studio where these pieces sit, with their history. There are two pieces in that drawer right now: a Her Tenderness from a wearer in Singapore who died in 2025, and a Slow Sunday from a wearer in Brooklyn whose daughter sent the piece back with a note. They live in the drawer, and I take them out a few times a year.

Those pieces I will eventually wear again, when the season feels right. The current collection — the pieces we ship today — I won't. That's the working principle.

If you've read this far

You've gotten the part of the brand most brands hide. The maker who doesn't wear her own work. The thin gold ring that came before everything. The prototype that fails by every standard SENMOMO holds — and which I wear anyway.

I think this is fine to admit. I think most considered makers have some version of the same arrangement. We make for the work to leave us. We hold the work that came to us. The two systems run in parallel; they don't collapse into one.

If you wear one of our pieces, you have something I don't have, and something I want you to have: an object made for you specifically, in this studio, on a specific day, by a person who knew enough about you to build it. The fact that I'm wearing my grandmother's ring instead doesn't subtract from your piece. It might, in a quiet way, add to it.