In the late 1990s, when Alix Dumas was a teenager living with her parents and siblings in Istanbul, she had an experience that foreshadowed her career in high jewelry.
“We went to the Grand Bazaar once a week,” Ms. Dumas, now 39, recalled earlier this month during a video call from the south of France, where she and her family were visiting friends. “And then we went on the small streets where they make jewelry. I just stood there and looked at the jewelers making things.
“I did not look so much at the finished pieces in these workshops, but to see how the jewelers worked,” Ms. Dumas said. “I looked at their hands and their materials and how they would melt all the old discarded jewels. I’ve always been very interested in the work of the hand.”
Unlike many jewelers who entrust the fabrication of their designs to bench jewelers skilled in model making, sculpting and polishing, Ms. Dumas creates each piece entirely by hand, from conception to completion. The only craft still missing from her repertoire is stone setting — a highly specialized skill she has been studying for the past three years. (“A beautiful setting will make your piece not average but wonderful,” she said.)
Since establishing Maison Alix Dumas in mid-2020 in France, Ms. Dumas has won eight awards for her jewelry, including best in haute couture at the 2023 Couture Design Awards in Las Vegas and the 2025 Empreinte de l’Année (Footprint of the Year) Award from the Centre du Luxe et de la Création, a luxury think tank and research center in Paris.
Anything But Basic
Ms. Dumas is best known for large-scale pieces, such as her Magnolia brooch, at 12 centimeters wide by 10 centimeters tall (4.7 inches by 3.9 inches), and for combining exotic colored stones — including sapphires from Sri Lanka, and Malaya garnets and spinels from the Umba River Valley in Tanzania — with materials such as titanium, ceramic and Searenn, a bio-based alloy of seashell farming waste.
While size is a hallmark of her work, she stressed it is not a goal in itself. “For a piece to inhabit the space, you need the right proportions,” she said, adding that colored stones are a recurring element in her designs so she often must create big pieces “to allow me enough space to develop this language.”
Given her commitment to fabrication, Ms. Dumas produces her one-of-a-kind jewels with prices of 10,000 euros ($11,700) or more, usually selling through word of mouth or at shows. “In a year, I will make about 20 pieces,” she said. “A few very big ones and a few smaller ones and many in between. But that’s more or less what I can do because I don’t do series.”
Nor does Ms. Dumas do basic jewelry: “I don’t want to be making simple, casual, everyday pieces.”
She came to that conclusion shortly after returning to the bench in 2020, following a four-year hiatus to raise her two young children. And it was her 2021 Eternity Night ring in black chromium-plated 18-karat gold, set with nearly 14 carats of blue sapphires and diamonds, that marked a turning point.
“It enabled me to see that I wanted to specialize in making very special works that had more to do with poetry, sculpture and art than regular jewelry,” she said.
The year 2021 saw Ms. Dumas hit her stride with the blue- and green-sapphire Hokusai ring, a two-finger style named for the Japanese artist behind the 19th-century woodblock print “Under the Wave Off Kanagawa,” and with the gold and silver Waves bracelet, depicting two curling waves of aquamarines and blue sapphires crashing together.
“Living where I live, the waves and the sea are very strong inspirations,” she said, referring to her home and her studio in Auray, a river port near the coast of the Brittany region of France.
The Waves bracelet, in particular, influenced her evolving craft. “It set me on the path of making very thin and detailed lacework within the metal,” she said.
That same year, the jewelry influencer Katerina Perez profiled Ms. Dumas on her blog, highlighting the high-end creations.
“Alix is a jeweler who prioritizes the look over the price,” Ms. Perez wrote in a text. “She is not driven by a commercial aspect but rather by a desire to create something that hasn’t been seen on the jewelry scene. I particularly admire her love for unusual materials.”
Benoît Repellin, the worldwide head of jewelry at Phillips, included two of Ms. Dumas’s rings in the auction house’s inaugural Geneva Jewels Auction in November 2023.
“Dumas’s jewels, marked by her inspired interplay of nature, use of color and experimentation with volume, rarely appear at auction, making their presence all the more exciting,” Mr. Repellin wrote in an email. “A standout piece is the Éternité d’Or ring, a very sculptural jewel that is one of her signature pieces and attracted younger bidders, contemporary collectors and jewelry connoisseurs.”
Tradition and Innovation
Born in Ciron in central France, Ms. Dumas spent her childhood in Indonesia, Turkey and Romania as her father had to move for his job with the French carmaker Renault. She attended the Sorbonne in Paris and, after a year abroad in Seville, Spain, graduated with a master’s degree in European studies and international business. (In May, at the Révélations design fair in Paris, she debuted her Alhambra earrings — obelisk-like forms in 18-karat gold, titanium, silver and ceramic with garnets, sapphires and diamonds — that honored her love for the Andalusia region of Spain.)
Realizing at 22 that she wanted to study jewelry, she enrolled at the Association pour la Formation et le Développement aux Arts Plastiques, known as AFEDAP, a small school in Paris focused on contemporary jewelry design. “I was very happy there for two years,” she said. “But I knew I wanted to learn all the traditional knowledge of French high jewelry.”
Ms. Dumas’s wish was granted in 2012 when a member of the school’s diploma jury, the owner of a prestigious workshop in southern France, offered her a job making one-of-a-kind jewels, many for one of the world’s most celebrated jewelers. (She declined to name the jeweler.) Newly married, she accepted the offer and promptly told her husband they were moving south.
“This is where I learned during almost five years all that I wanted to learn,” she said. “We each had one piece to make from scratch, from the sketches to the finished piece. We would do everything except setting.”
Today, Ms. Dumas sees her work, with its focus on sustainable materials, as both a departure from and a continuation of the French high jewelry tradition. “What I do nobody would have made in Art Deco, Art Nouveau or any period, but there are strong links in between and these links help people accept a more contemporary language — because my pieces have both,” she said.
While acknowledging that her path — hand-making each jewel — is rare in a world driven by technology and A.I., she hopes future generations will recognize the poetry in her creations.
“You would not believe how many people tell me every day that I’m heading the wrong way because I should be doing it all on a computer,” she said. “I hope in a hundred years, people will see that it led somewhere, that I will have developed something.”
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