21: Are Charm Bracelets Just Travel Journals?

Wear your memories, from pea-sized Alamos to tiny Eiffel Towers.

Lauren Bacall rocking charm bracelets around 1950.

The Lincoln Memorial incongruously dangles next to the Alamo and a Mexican burro brays beside the Cupid Statue from London’s Piccadilly Circus on my mother’s silver charm bracelet. As a kid, I was fascinated by the chain strung with two dozen or so miniaturized world monuments.

My mother Carol—clad in a groovy 1970s maxi dress—would breeze out to dinner parties with my father, the bracelet often chiming at her wrist. When she bent down to peck me goodbye, I’d gently touch a charm and ask for its story, like the Caribbean palm tree next to the San Francisco cable car. “Oh, your Daddy bought that for me when we were on our honeymoon in Puerto Rico,” she said. “He had too many daiquiris and fell out of a beach hammock!”

Charms on my mother’s bracelet include the Lincoln Memorial, the Alamo, and a thunderbird from New Mexico.

Interspersed with other amulets—Mom’s opal birthstone, a headshot of my baby sister rendered in silver—the bracelet was as much biography as bijoux. “Charm bracelets are a way to wear your memories,” says Nicole Parker King, the founder of Jet Set Candy, a jewelry company specializing in travel charms, from a teeny gold Japanese pagoda the length of a fingernail to a Barbie-sized silver passport with pages you can open. “Charms are small, and you can look down and see so many different places that you’ve been.”

A Jet Set Candy bracelet decked with charms including an enameled French flag and numerous replicas of airline boarding passes.

A Charmed History

Wearing talismans on your neck or wrist dates back for millennia—think Turkish evil eye charms or Egyptians buried with scarab pendants. Victorian women loved lockets; their men peacocked around with fancy pocket-watch fobs studded with onyx or carnelian stones.

But it wasn’t until the middle of the 20th century that charm bracelets jingled into fashion. Fueled by post-World War II prosperity and the rise of leisure travel, ladies from Atlanta to Amsterdam started collecting charms and affixing them to gold, silver, or base-metal chains. There were even charm-of-the-month clubs.

“Women whose own mothers and grandmothers had never left the farm or shtetl began to go abroad,” says jewelry designer and author Tracey Zabar in her book Charmed Bracelets. “Souvenir travel charms boasted of these trips around the world—or more locally, around the state.”

The bracelets have jangled in and out of style since then, but the charms themselves never vanish. “Sometimes, if dainty jewelry is in vogue, you’ll see a few small charms on a light chain,” says King. “You can even hang them from an earring.”

Where the Charms Are

Souvenir silver and gold charms used to headline at gift shops and museum stores around the world. That’s how my mother acquired her quarter-inch tall Empire State Building and a shrunken replica of the statue of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain’s hometown.

Texas-themed charms like a bluebonnet (top) and a gallon of Blue Bell ice cream are created by James Avery.

Now, you’re more likely to find them at jewelry shops. I recently picked up a gold and turquoise scarab pendant at a boutique in Luxor, Egypt. James Avery stores around Texas shape silver and gold into wearable symbols of the Lone Star State and other locales. Jet Set Candy, with its flagship boutique in New York City’s Grand Central Station, offers wee silver or gold passport stamps from dozens of countries, pea-sized globes, and chains to put them on. “People also buy charms of ‘home and away’—where they live and where they visit,” says King.

Jet Set Candy creates passport charms for dozens of destinations in silver or gold.

Giving old charms new magic

Or you might, like me, inherit your mother’s charm bracelet, giving a loved one’s memories another life, another spin around the dance floor. My dear friend and fellow writer Anna Kahoe has the bracelet her father gifted to her Spanish-born mother, Conchita. “It has Kennedy dollars and charms of castanets and bullfighters on it, so it’s a melding of the U.S. and Spain,” she says.

A detail from writer Anna Kahoe’s charm bracelet, which her Maryland-born father gave to her Spanish-born mother.

Vintage bracelets—or single charms—are plentiful on eBay and Etsy, too. I turned up a bracelet festooned with shield-shaped charms from Austrian ski towns and another gold-tone piece showing off a teeny Arc de Triomphe and a sombrero emblazoned “Acapulco.”

Researching this story, I fell for a tinkly number holding 21 enameled U.S. state charms. When I slip it on, the jaunty yellow Arizona, green New Mexico, and red Massachusetts clang together, the soundtrack of an epic road trip.

Vintage enameled U.S. state charms made in the 1960s and 1970s are widely available on Etsy and eBay.

“Charm bracelets have multiple totems for how you might live differently,” says Kahoe. She sometimes wears a silver charm bracelet she won at an auction. It’s decorated with baubles including a circle engraved, “Good luck Ginny,” and a mouse-sized Hofbrauhaus mug. “I feel like I’m part of Ginny’s family,” she says. “I have the hieroglyphics of her life.”

A charm bracelet, presumably once owned by a woman named Ginny, was acquired by writer Anna Kahoe at an auction.

The trips my mother took are far in the past. But when I wear her bracelet, I think of who she might’ve met in London or what wonders she saw in France. There are still open links on the chain—maybe it’s time to add a few mementos of my own?

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