Fashion. Glamour. Elegance. Tiaras. This could be your life. Have you ever looked at a glitzy bracelet and thought, "You know, that could use a few more rhinestones"? Maybe you've broken off a conversation mid-sentence because you passed the jewelry counter at Nordstrom. Maybe you've just always thought your particular creative genius was rooted more in flashy bits of flair than in stereotypical artistic outlets like painting and scream poetry. 

If all of that sounds like you, you may want to think about a career in jewelry design.

 

Price goes up as the amount, and size, of precious stones go up. It's a pretty simple correlation. (Source)

Jewelry designers get to spend all day creating the fresh new look in necklaces, bracelets, rings, watch bands—you name it. All trinkets and accessories are fair game, so long as you can find a way to attach some precious stones and convince people they're worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

You have a lot of options these days as a jewelry designer. You could go the more traditional route and try to design for an established retail store, but the advent of small-time self-marketing on sites like Etsy, along with curatorial sites like Pinterest (doing whatever it is that Pinterest does), makes it easier than ever to start hocking your homemade jewelry.

Starting a jewelry line is easy; getting people to buy it is a little more difficult. That said, if you do manage to build a strong Etsy following, or if you can snag a cushy job designing for a respected company, the pay isn't too shabby. The average jewelry designer earns just under $50,000 per year, though that's only a reliable figure for those designers working for established companies—not so much for the self-starter working primarily through an Internet-based personal storefront (source). 

Like any field that involves creativity and artistry, it's plenty possible to carve out a decent living if you work hard and have the necessary talents, but there are a lot of designers who dwell at the extreme high and extreme low ends of the pay scale. The average salary calculation would be way, way lower than $50,000 if it included all people attempting to sell their creations through the Internet. 

Then there are also big-time designers who can basically retire from the commissions they earn on uber-expensive, uber-popular pieces. If you have faith in your talents, we say go ahead and follow your dreams.

 

Many designers cut their teeth in the ultra-competitive world of arts and crafts time. (Source)

As far as the more day-to-day functioning of the job is concerned, you'll be working with tons of tiny tools and torches to manipulate gems and jewels and precious metals. You'll be able to cut up and mold stuff that is not easily broken or cut up. It's like old-school arts and crafts time, but way more sophisticated, way more serious, and way more high-stakes.

You'll likely spend lots of time designing with a computer-aided design program (CAD) or Adobe Illustrator (source). Working with computers is nice because the programs allow for more precise detailing of the design—a huge plus in an industry where a minor mistake could ruin a diamond worth many thousands of dollars. So yeah, it helps to have those dimensions figured as exactly as possible.

There's no official degree or anything that you need to become a jewelry designer, but you can learn how to do all of this stuff through a training program or trade school. They'll teach you how to use the software and the tools and even help you create a style or vision for your jewelry line. 

You can also learn all of this through the more old-fashioned approach of apprenticeships, but frankly, unless you have an "in" with someone, that's not likely to happen. The industry isn't exactly booming for designers; it's actually declining currently. So, if you want to make this a career, your best bet is to check out one of those training programs (source). 

Because of the unfortunate state of the jewelry market, we can't promise you'll be able to focus only on design once you get in. There is, of course, still demand for custom-made jewelry—no matter how bad the economy, there'll always be rich people who want something no one else has. And if you can't make the ends meet solely through design, you might also consider doing some jewelry repair on the side.

We won't lie to you: even when things are good, your hours are going to be nuts. Aside from the erratic working patterns that creative design can demand, jewelry designers often work on everything from the crafting of the jewelry to selling it. And if you're going the DIY route through something like Etsy, you'll be the alpha and the omega of the process. Be ready to give it your all.

So, yeah…it's not quite as simple as those macaroni necklaces your teacher praised you for when you were six. This is going to take a lot of hard work, talent, and luck. But if you've got the skills and are ready to put in the time, you just might be the next person that JLaw's wearing on the red carpet.

Your work, of course, not literally you. That'd be weird and probably too heavy for her to strut comfortably.

• More