About ten years ago I travelled through Egypt. I kept noticing the same image everywhere, carved into temple walls, depicted in small amulets, laid out across market stalls in every village I passed through.
At the time I didn't fully understand it's meaning, but the image stayed with me.
Over the years it naturally became a recurring element in my work. And now, for the first time, I've created a collection built entirely around it.
What the scarab actually means
The scarab deisgn comes from the dung beetle, a creature that might seem unremarkable at first. But in ancient Egyptian culture, it carried one of the most significant symbolic meanings. The beetle rolls a ball across the ground, and from that ball, new life emerges. To the Egyptians, this mirrored the movement of the sun across the sky, the daily act of rising, crossing, and setting, only to rise again.
The scarab became associated with Khepri, god of the rising sun, of transformation, of renewal. To wear one was not simply decoration. It was alignment with an idea that change is not the exception, it is the constant.
Scarabs were given as gifts during times of transition. They were placed with the dead to ensure safe passage into the next life. They were carved into temple walls not as ornament but as statement. The Egyptians used this small, extraordinary creature to say something that still holds: that from what has ended, something new is always becoming.
Why I keep returning to it
What draws me back to the scarab is not the protection symbolism, though that is part of its history. It is the idea of transformation - specifically, the kind that is slow and personal and not always visible from the outside.
The scarab doesn't represent sudden change, it represents process. The steady, sometimes hidden work of becoming something different. That is the kind of change most of us are actually living through at any given time.
When I design with this symbol, that is the energy I am thinking about. Not triumph. Not arrival. The in-between, the becoming.
The new pieces
Each piece in this collection started from a different part of the scarab's symbolic world. Some are bold and sculptural, sitting close to the original iconography I first encountered in Egypt. Others are quieter, the scarab is present but woven into something larger.
Several pieces include stones chosen for their alignment with transformation: Moldavite, known for its intense and accelerating energy. Malachite, long associated with deep transformation and the release of old patterns. Lapis lazuli, historically linked to wisdom, truth, and inner vision. Each stone is set within a design that honours the original symbol while making it something that belongs to now.
On the anniversary
Ten years since Egypt. I did not plan for the scarab to become such a constant symbol in my work. But looking back, it makes complete sense. It is all about return, about cycles. About finding meaning in what keeps coming back around.
If you feel drawn to these pieces, trust that. In my experience, people are rarely drawn to the scarab by accident.
Shop my handcut Scarab Pieces as part of my Egyptian Anniversary 2026 Collection