The story behind Thornback

I was mid drunken social media doom-scroll, a couple of years ago when I came across the term “Thornback”. It’s a derogatory 17^th century term for an unmarried woman. Apparently, a spinster is up to the age of 25, after that, you’re a thornback. I instantly fell in love with how witchy it sounded and love the idea of reclaiming a derogatory term. So, I bought the domain name and just sat on it for a couple of years, because I didn’t really have any ideas for a brand that would be worthy of such a name.

I love gemstones but the ethics around them is super confusing. Most natural stones are not traceable, meaning we often don’t know where they came from, or the welfare standards of the workers involved. More ethical stones are much more expensive which can be a good option for some but not everyone. The majority of lab grown gems come from factories in China, where we also don’t know much about the welfare standards.

Lab grown gems can be very cheap, especially when going for stones such as rubies and sapphires. But I find they just don’t feel as special. There’s nothing hugely interesting about them.

In 2023 I started to learn more about the lab grown gems that are used for science and industry. These are not created to look exactly like natural stones, they contain specific chemicals and rare earth minerals that give them extraordinary characteristics. Fluorescent Lumo garnets that glow in sunlight, green laser garnets that turn red under UV, rubies that were created for a project aiming to shoot nukes out of the sky with lasers (turns out that’s quite difficult). These gemstones are not only visually superior to natural stones (in my opinion) but they are also genuinely fascinating.

It became obvious that this is a direction I need to explore, it may just be my ADHD brain getting carried away, but hopefully it’s not.

I hope you’ll join me on this journey!