The Heart Behind Your Jewelry.
Pascale Khoury • Founder & Jewelry Designer
Where It Began
Three minutes from our Beirut apartment, there was a jewelry store I walked past every morning on the way to school. I would look across the road and greet the owner. He knew my family. He knew my father, a man of such direct honesty that people both respected and feared him. And slowly, without knowing it, I was building something with that jeweler. Not a transaction. A relationship.
I was twelve years old.
Every allowance I received, I counted it and buried it in a candy tin, the long rectangular kind, hidden beneath my underwear in my drawer. No one knew. I did not ask anyone's opinion. I never do. I saw the outcome, envisioned it, and moved toward it.
When I finally walked through that door alone, the owner looked up, surprised. A twelve-year-old girl, unaccompanied, choosing jewelry with complete certainty. I selected pearls and 18 karat gold earrings for my mother. Because pearls were the language of the elegance I had always seen in her, and 18 karat gold was the standard she deserved. I wanted to give her something she had never owned. Something chosen entirely by my taste, for her.
My mother did not cry. She did something more powerful. She told everyone in the family. She declared, in the way only Lebanese mothers can, that her daughter understood value. That in a country at war, where money could disappear and beauty could be lost, this child had chosen something that would hold. Gold and pearls do not lose their worth. They carry it forward.
That was the first Pearls & Karats piece. I just did not have the name for it yet.
What I Carried
With Me
At seventeen, I fled Lebanon by boat with nothing but faith and a knowing I could not yet name. I arrived not with credentials or a gemology degree. I arrived with vision, discernment, and the conviction that beauty is sacred, not decorative.
I built a life in Austin. A degree from the University of Texas. A luxury salon, Villa Salon Boutique, built alongside my husband Ati, a master stylist whose gift I recognized before he did. And through every chapter, I kept returning to jewelry. To the pieces I found on my travels. To the stories they carried. To the women who put them on and stood differently.
Pearls & Karats was not born in a studio. It was born in the space between survival and calling, where a woman learns what truly matters and refuses to create anything less.
