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Were to buy gems in Yekaterinburg. Ural bijou designer

You often send me questions about the Ural gems and where to buy them. Fortunately, the traditions of stone cutting and jewelry art has remained in the Urals. In Yekaterinburg you can meet people who have dedicated their lives and careers to the Ural gems.

One of them is Irina Zakhozhay, a designer of bijouterie. She has just been awarded as the Jewelry Designer of 2017 in Sverdlovsk Region. Irina is a frequent partner of the Ural Fashion Week and Miss Yekaterinburg Beauty Pageant. She is not a professional designer though. Irina graduated the Ural Polytechnical University and she is an engineer and a lawyer by profession. Her love to stones had begun in the childhood with her grandmother’s collection and it finally won.

Despite all her titles and popularity in Yekaterinburg, Irina is a very humble easy-going person. We met not long ago in her salon. She makes everything herself with the help of only one assistant . The workshop is located in the same place. So you can come to the shop, meet the owner, see how she works and have a cup of coffee with her. Customers often bring their dresses to choose a necklace or a bracelet to match the outfit

Irina in her salon

Irina is a stone designer with a typically Ural approach: while jewelry designers all over the world draw a sketch of an item and then search for necessary stones, Ural designers start with a stone. You take a raw mineral, study it and try to understand what story the stone is telling you. That’s why traditionally Ural jewelry is quite massive. It’s a crime for the locals to change the shape of natural minerals. Stones are beautiful as they are.

Ural jewelry is quite massive

You can even bring your own stone to the salon and the designer will think how to make a jewelry piece out of it. If you need something simple and the stones are available in the workshop it may sometimes take 1 hour for Irina to create a bracelet or earrings for you.

This quartz is as beautiful as it is

Irina states that she works with bijou only, i.e. uses gems, not precious stones. That’s why the prices in her salon are very fair. You can find items on sale from the old collections for 500rub and massive necklaces from the Ural Fashion Week for 7000rub (100euro).

The bijou salon of Irina Zakhozhay is located in the center of Yekaterinburg. Business Center Manhattan on Mamina Sibiryaka st., 101. 2^nd Floor, Office 222. The online shop is not available yet but you can always contact the designer on her Facebook business page:  https://www.facebook.com/irina.zahohzay?fref=pb&hc_location=friends_tab

p.s. This post is not commercial just like the other ones. The idea of the blog is to bring the Urals closer to you and to make it more open for the outside world. I only write about places and people who in my opinion try to make the Urals a better place for living and traveling and whom I like myself. So, obviously, this whole blog is very subjective.

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