Kate-Inspired Purchase Review: Mirabelle Gold Plated Loop Earrings

Hello everyone, and welcome back to a new repli-kate review post about the Duchess of Cambridge's gold loop earrings. Just thought I'd share some photos of these beauties with you all as the Kate community was abuzz with speculation about the origin of this particular pair.

 

The Duchess debuted a new pair of earrings on Friday last week, 16 January, for an event hosted by The Fostering Network in Islington, North London. 

 

 

Photos via Daily Mail and Mirabelle.

 

While I can't say I was a huge fan of the brown-dress-and-black-accessories combo, I really loved the earrings, delicate, go-with-everything gold tone hoops and, in my search for an ID, stumbled upon these on the Felt website which seemed a pretty close match:

 

Via Felt.

 

Described on the Felt webiste as "gold plated brass earrings, consisting of three entwined hoops with hammered finish sides" and retailing at just £25 (about $38 or €33 at today's exchange rate), plus £10 shipping to Europe ($15 or €13), I quickly snapped up a pair (they're available in a silver plated finish as well). It was later clarified that Felt, a contemporary and vintage jewellery mini boutique in London's Chelsea, is actually just the stockist of these, which are by hand made, fair trade jewellery company Mirabelle. There was discussion as to whether the earrings actually worn by the Duchess were one of two similar designs available to purchase on the Mirabelle website, the Lolita or the slightly bigger Gina. For the lowdown on this, you can read the brilliantly informative post Anna from My Small Obsessions wrote on her blog.

 

The bottom line is, Felt came out saying they had sent the earrings to Catherine as a gift. The protocol of royal gift-giving is a bit blurry to me here, as I thought members of the Royal Family could only accept gifts from private individuals, not businesses, but of course we don't really know the circumstances of this particular situation and I'd say it is entirely possible that the Duchess paid for these anyway.

 

Today I was thrilled to find this envelope from Felt in my mailbox (by the way, the address was beautifully handwritten, a definite plus in my books when receiving mail from a business!).

 

The earrings were (appropriately) packaged in a soft grey felt logoed pouch tied with a plush royal blue velvet ribbon:

 

 

 

I'm pleased to report these are way more gorgeous in real life than they looked on the web. Both on the Mirabelle and Felt websites, the earrings looked rather dark, antique gold, even a bit brassy on the Mirabelle photo (first one in this post). In person, they're very delicate and lightweight, a beautiful yellow gold colour.

 

The three intertwined hoops measure exactly 4 cm long, with the largest hoop being about 2 cm in diameter and the smallest about 1.3 cm. They have a hook fastening which makes the total lenght about 5.6 cm.

 

The hammered sides have two different finishes, as you can see in the photo above: one has a sort of delicately bubbly, slightly raised finish (right-hand side of the largest hoop), the other looks more like a sort of tiny horizontal stripes (left-hand side of the largest hoop).

This is how they look tried on:

 

 

 

The earrings remain available to buy from Felt, while it's currently possible to pre-order them from Mirabelle. 

On the whole, I love my new earrings and I'm very, very happy I discovered a new retailer in Felt, as they stock some seriously gorgeous items (among them, another favourite with the Duchess, the Double Leaf earrings by Catherine Zoraida) in a wide range of prices, like these Peace Symbol, Star and Disc Charms, from their Affordable Diamond range:

Or this Sea Green Calcedony Charm: