What is a locket?

A locket is a small case worn as jewelry, almost always as a pendant on a chain. The defining part is the hinge: it opens. A solid pendant only shows its outside. A locket has an inside, and the inside is private until someone chooses to open it.

Most lockets hold a photograph. Some hold a name, a date, or one short line instead. Older ones sometimes held a lock of hair. The object is the same either way. It is a place to keep a specific person or a specific fact close to the body.

People say “locket necklace” when they mean the pendant and the chain together. The locket is the part that opens. The chain decides where it sits. A shorter chain puts it at the collarbone, where it is seen. A longer chain drops it lower, where it is easier to forget and easier to wear with a high neckline.

If a necklace does not open, it is not a locket, even if it is heart-shaped. The heart is a common shape. It is not the definition.

A face, trimmed to the frame and printed on matte paper, so the locket still closes. Initials, a year, or one name on the inside. A line that only the wearer needs to read. Two photographs, facing each other, when the locket opens like a book.

The mistake is asking a small frame to hold a complicated picture. One person, good light, and a plain background survive being printed at the size of a coin. A group, a landscape, or a dark photograph usually does not.

Lockets grew out of earlier lockets and reliquaries: small containers worn on the body to keep something protected. By the sixteenth century in Europe they were sentimental jewelry, and by the nineteenth century a photograph inside a locket was ordinary. The photograph is newer than the idea. The idea is that some things should be carried, not displayed.

That is still the use. A locket is chosen when a picture on a phone is not the same as a picture against the skin, and when the outside of the jewelry does not have to explain itself.

Start with the person who will wear it, not with the shape you like. What metal is already in their jewelry. Whether they will wear it every day or only for a reason. Whether it has to hold a face or a few words.

Hearts are the shape people recognize, and they leave less room for a portrait. Ovals give a face more space. Gold, silver, and rose gold here are finishes on stainless steel. Pick the color that belongs against their skin and with the rest of what they wear.