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As gold and silver prices continue to soar, the metal’s relatively inexpensive cost has attracted new users.
In 2020, in the midst of a pandemic lockdown, the jeweler Adam Neeley and his husband, Zach Rollins, threw a dinner party for themselves at their home in Laguna Beach, Calif. Their inspiration was “Les Dîners de Gala,” an opulent cookbook by Salvador Dalí published in 1973 and dedicated to Mr. Dalí’s wife, Gala.
Later that night, Mr. Neeley awoke from a series of dreams in which he was a guest at one of the Dalís’s extravagant feasts. In one reverie, he wandered into a garden, sat on a bench and watched, wide-eyed, as vibrantly colored creatures alighted around him.
“Right on the trunk of this amazing tree was this gorgeous blue butterfly, just shimmering in the moonlight,” Mr. Neeley recalled during a recent interview in Beverly Hills, Calif. “Then suddenly, there was this little ivy that started crawling on my ear. I looked down and there is this gorgeous rose bush. It blossomed open and glowed right in front of my eyes.
“I promise I didn’t take psychedelics,” he added.
One look at the phantasmagoric designs that Mr. Neeley sketched after waking and you might be tempted to doubt him. Introduced last month at the PAD art fair in Paris, the jewels in his Dali’s Garden collection boast a Technicolor palette, ranging from a pair of four-inch cobalt blue, sapphire-studded Morpho earrings inspired by the fluorescent butterfly to the Rosa Petula, a collar necklace of purplish-red petals smothered with more than 55 carats of Burmese rubies.
That’s because the new collection, unlike his previous creations in gold, was crafted almost entirely in titanium. Named for the Titans of Greek mythology, the space-age metal — as light as aluminum yet stronger than steel — can be anodized into a range of hues. The process begins when the naturally gray metal is placed in an electrolytic solution and zapped with electric currents. Each charge creates an iridescent oxide layer that blushes, depending on the voltage, from bronze to purple, blue, teal, green, pink and yellow (just not bright red).