Lydia Courteille unveils the new collection "Sahara"

The Parisian jewellery designer takes us on a journey through the dreamlike moods of a desert trip.

For her Sahara collection, Lydia Courteille was inspired by my travels to Tassili in Algeria. It was at a show that she found a collection of these amazing and magnetic blue opals. The very same day that she found some russet coloured gemstones with a stunning lively sparkle, they were topazolites. The indigo blues reminded Courteille of the clothes worn by the men in the Sahara Desert, the Touaregs; the depth of the opals' colour took her back to the huge inclining sand dunes under the star filled night sky. The topazolites are a natural foil of gold to the blue stones reminiscent of the golden sands of the Sahara, an untouched landscape sculpted only by the wind. To walk for hours without meeting a soul only to come across a few tracks left behind by the blue scarabs or the strange prehistoric rust red silhouette paintings on the rocks from the Sefar plateau. Tassili N'Ajjer, the plateau of rivers in the Berber language. The rock art left behind by Bovidian pasteurs shows the landscape and vegetation dating more than 10,000 years old: that of a luscious green Sahara populated with flowers and animals. This collection is an invitation to travel in time and space to the secrets of the Sahara. It transports us to a universe of shimmering sands and the oriental grandeur of midnight blue evenings witnessed only by showers of shooting stars.

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