A Jeweler Who Speaks Four Languages — and One in Gold
New York — At a workbench tucked inside one of Manhattan’s storied jewelry houses, Isabel Cid leans over a piece of metal no larger than a thumbnail. With the steady hand of a surgeon and the patience of a poet, she coaxes it into something luminous.
Isabel Cid, 39, is not the kind of jeweler who stumbled into her craft. Her path has been deliberate, if unconventional: a degree in English Philology from Madrid, a master’s in literature from Paris, and years spent navigating the worlds of fashion design and digital marketing before she found her métier in fine jewelry. “It was always about detail,” she has said of her trajectory. “Whether in words, fabrics, or metals, I was drawn to precision.”
Her training began in earnest in Stockholm, apprenticing under Annika Bertilsdotter, where she learned the fundamentals of resizing rings, soldering, and stone setting. Later, in New York, she refined her skills at Studio Jewelers LTD, immersing herself in the technical rigor of fabrication, wax carving, and laser soldering.
By 2021, she was at Catbird, the Brooklyn-based jewelry brand beloved for its delicate designs and cult collaborations. There, she not only fabricated prototypes — including pieces for Phoebe Bridgers and Vito Giallo — but also helped shape the production process, writing technical specifications and advising on design feasibility.
Today, Isabel Cid works at Belperron and Verdura, two of the most prestigious names in high jewelry, where she designs and fabricates pieces that marry tradition with innovation. Colleagues describe her as collaborative and exacting, a jeweler who brings both artistry and technical fluency to the bench.
Fluent in Spanish, English, French, and Italian, she is as comfortable in a Parisian atelier as she is in a New York studio. But her true language is craft: the quiet dialogue between hand, tool, and stone.
In an industry that often prizes spectacle, Isabel Cid has built her reputation on something subtler — the conviction that beauty lies in the details, and that the smallest object, made well, can carry the weight of permanence.
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