White Paradise: Legends, Dreams and Frozen Worlds in Lydia Courteille’s New High Jewellery Collection

Each January marks the debut of a new High Jewellery collection from Parisian jewellery designer Lydia Courteille. A glimpse into the inner workings of her imagination, last year saw the launch of Think Pink, a series of animal-inspired jewels seen through the lens of magical rose-coloured glasses. The year before, Shamanic Dreams drew inspiration from indigenous Huichol traditions. For 2026, the mood is turning decidedly chillier with White Paradise. 

Aligned with Pantone’s Colour of the Year, Cloud Dancer, an icy blast of Arctic air runs through the collection. Divided into five distinct themes, all are unified by diamonds and stones on the white spectrum. These include a set of dendritic white opals originating from Turkey, acquired by Lydia during a trip to the Tucson Gem Show. Reminiscent of snowy landscapes, she is particularly fond of them for the patterns they reveal when cut.

“This led me to my first source of inspiration: the northern regions, the Arctic and the vast icy expanses of the polar ice cap,” Lydia told me, giving rise to Landscapes of the Far North, chapter one of White Paradise. The hero piece is a High Jewellery necklace featuring a sculptural heart-shaped pendant. Suspended from a chain of baguette-cut diamond and blue moonstone snowflakes, the heart drips with diamond icicles, cracking open under the weight of the cold to reveal a dendritic opal.

The flora and fauna of the far north inspired one of the most charming chapters of White Paradise. Long celebrated for her high jewellery bestiary of bejewelled animals, Courteille expands it once again this year with a series of creatures that take on the colour of snow for camouflage. The seal ring, in particular, is a delight. Bobbing on its back in dendritic opal waters, the seal holds a pearl between its flippers, encircled by chunks of diamond and sapphire ice.

For another chapter, Courteille turns to Indigenous traditions found across northern cultures. Totemic forms, often conceived as gateways between earthly and celestial realms, are a recurring motif. The White Paradise cuff echoes this symbolism through a freeform rock crystal that represents the mythical Sky World, encircled by watchful guardian figures with apatite eyes, rendered in silver and diamonds. 

Elsewhere, a pendant reveals its story only to those who open it. Hidden inside is a shaman wearing a bear mask, captured in the act of summoning the stars. Across many Siberian and Arctic cultures, the bear is revered as a powerful ancestral and cosmic figure, often linked to creation myths and the foundations of human society. Its presence here reinforces Lydia’s fascination with frozen landscapes as places of ritual, myth and spiritual transformation.

Dreams and legends run through the collection’s Viking chapter, a fantastical world of dragons, enchanted weapons and capricious gods. These jewels have all the ingredients for an epic Game of Thrones battle, including a sword featuring Fáfnir, the treasure-guarding dragon of Norse mythology. 

Things take a softer turn in the Singing Winter ring, inspired by the song “Je reviendrai à Montréal” by Canadian singer-songwriter Robert Charlebois. In it, Charlebois expresses a longing to feel the cold of Montreal in winter, evoking a “rain of blue roses and golden roses” – a poetic reference to the Northern Lights. Echoing this imagery, the ring’s central opal is shaped like the petals of a rose, framed by clusters of flowers in blackened gold set with sapphires and 18k yellow gold.

Lydia tells me she is already working on a second chapter of White Paradise, “as the number of themes made it quite extensive”. Spanning dragons, snow-dwelling animals, frozen landscapes, ancient myths and flowers, the collection reveals a creative range few jewellers can match. Lydia’s imagination knows no bounds, and if this first chapter is anything to go by, part two promises to be just as spellbinding.