But first, lets have a look at the dress that Naergilien suggested that I pair the jewellery with for this review. This gorgeous creation, here shown in charcoal, is inspired by one of the gowns worn by Keira Knightley in the movie The Duchess. Like all of Naergilien’s pieces, it is a more or less fully photosourced gown, which you may either like or dislike. Personally, I like both photosourced and hand-drawn, as well as hybrids of the two, whether it is for clothing or for skins. Its the final result that matters, and I am really liking how this one came out. The lace on it, btw, is sourced from actual 200-year-old lace, and it looks wonderfully delicate.

The skirt (which has a wonderful shine and a real appearance of weight to it) combines a system skirt with a prim skirt, and here I think the system skirt works very well as it is used to fill out beneath the prim skirt. This means you won’t see it much affected by stretching as you stand in different poses, though you do get that line between top and system skirt that to my understanding is rather unavoidable. Some of you might feel a system skirt gets too bulky, but with such a wide silhouette to the skirt it doesn’t matter that the system skirt adds on a few extra pounds. It just makes your waist look slimmer. ;)

I wish I could have managed a clearer picture of the jewellery, but it is sometimes very difficult to show off the intricacies of prim-heavy jewellery, so you really need to look at the full-size image and ideally also check this out in person (there’s a temp rezzer in the store showing a rezzed copy). Prim-heavy, yes, but oh so gorgeous. The necklace and the chandelier earrings are wonderfully opulent, and the texturing of the metal really conveys a period-appropriate look. The cut of the gems is also, as far as I can tell, quite appropriate for the period.

The gems are also quite special in that Naergilien has used the SL alpha/transparencies bug to her advantage. In some of the gems, she has layered two transparent colours, which means they will shift in colour between different angles. Out of the 12 sets there are 3 that use this method; the vitrail shown here (you can see a slight shift to blue on the earrings, but while the photo was being taken, I saw the gems as a cool steel blue whereas Ran saw this green colour) and also the alexandrite and the fireopal. The other 9 sets also use two textures, but just with a subtle sparkle difference instead of a different colour.

The skin worn here is the brand new and utterly charming photoreal Devon skin from Adam n Eve, in the natural makeup, which I thought would fit with the period look. Though I imagine any image-conscious lady would have tried to do something about those freckles. The hair is Calico’s divine Helen I, which perhaps is more fantasy than period, but I just love it with the Devon skin.