The Ins and Outs of Traveling With Jewelry

As co-president and design director of Chopard, Caroline Gruosi-Scheufele is used to traveling with jewelry.

She spends about six months of the year on the road, and she always brings along pieces to wear that will represent the watch and jewelry label well at business meetings and events.

While Ms. Gruosi-Scheufele has the luxury of borrowing jewelry from Geneva-based Chopard, which has been in the watch business since 1860, she always travels with a few personal favorites as well. She tries to minimize the number of pieces she carries for insurance reasons and always matches her outfits with jewelry before she packs.

"I always pick the jewelry first and then I pick the dress," says Ms. Gruosi-Scheufele, who notes that she tends to choose dresses based on whether they are "good jewelry dresses" that won't outshine the pieces. "They're feminine and sexy but not overloaded with sequins or colors -- something plain but very well-cut."

Her travel staples include a diamond watch with a relatively large face, for easy time-telling during meetings, she says. She likes having a few diamonds on the watch-face, because "when you have a bad day they always make you smile," but also because a piece with a little flash will work well with both day and night ensembles, so she won't have to bring another watch. Calling herself an "earrings freak," Ms. Gruosi-Scheufele brings several pairs on each trip, favoring large, sparkly diamond studs or earrings that extend no more than an inch beneath the earlobe for business meetings. (Longer ones "can be distracting," she says.) For daytime, she favors a long, simple gold necklace with a large pendant, which she calls versatile and not too showy. She's always careful to wear just one striking piece with each ensemble, whether it is the earrings, a brooch or a necklace.

When packing her jewelry, she places each item in a small suede drawstring pouch, ties it up, and then places the pouch in a large suede drawstring bag with pockets to hold the pouches. The suede protects the jewelry, she says, and the malleable pouch is easy to pack. She is careful not to pack diamonds in the large pouch if it contains pearls or colored stones -- which are softer -- as the diamonds can scratch up or damage those pieces. If she is bringing a piece that combines diamonds and softer stones, she transports it in the box it came in; usually, a jeweler's box will hold the piece in place so the stones don't rub up against one another.

If Ms. Gruosi-Scheufele wants to give her jewelry some added sparkle while she is on the road, she sometimes gives it a quick cleaning using her grandmother's "old, old-fashioned" method: Dip the piece for about five minutes in lukewarm, slightly soapy water (using regular hotel bar soap), rinse it in lukewarm water and then dry it with a suede cloth. "If you're careful, you can clean anything in that," she says.
Source: wsj