Fancy + Fun in The Iconic "Soap" Bubble Necklace

designed by sisters Marina and Susanna Sent.

I was at my mom's house without my kids, going through old boxes, when I found a whole life I forgot I lived.

I'd asked her once before — back when I first went looking for this necklace — if I had anything left at her house. She said no. So when I felt this pull toward her closet and opened a box to find it *right there*, waiting, I actually cried. My intuition is on fire. Nothing was supposed to still be here, and here it all was.

Pictures of Mindy — a friend from my twenties, back when I first became a flight attendant. That job pulled me out of my New Jersey upbringing and into California, where I built a whole new circle of flight attendant friends, far from everything familiar. Mindy recently passed, and there she was in a photo, young and unaware of how much I'd miss her one day. Pictures of other friends from that same era. My niece and nephew when they were little. And pictures of *me* — younger, prettier, fancier, happier. Tanned in almost every one. I was fancy. I forgot I was fancy.

Underneath the photos: my old Dooney & Burke bag. A pair of monster-print heels I loved so much I only ever let myself wear them once. And the necklace — heavy strands of clear glass bubbles, cool and substantial in my hand — that I bought in Seattle, at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), on a trip with my parents over 20 years ago.

I looked it up. It's the Iconic Soap Necklace, designed by sisters Marina and Susanna Sent — Murano, Italy, a multi-generational family of glassmakers. In the early '90s, the sisters broke away from traditional Venetian glass design to create bold, minimal, architectural wearable art.

I went looking for more of their story, because something about it wouldn't let go of me. Both of their grandfathers worked in glass. Susanna trained as an architect, then spent years in their father's company learning the old techniques — decoration, fusion, grinding — before she and her sister ever thought about doing their own thing. The craft was already in their hands.

And then here's the part that got me: the whole business started because one day, the sisters just started playing with glass and made some jewelry for themselves. Not a five-year plan. Not a rebrand. Just play. Friends asked for pieces, then customers did, and that's how it began. MoMA in New York was carrying their jewelry within a few years.

That's the F in my FINS framework, right there. Fun, first. Before strategy, before the pivot had a name — an inner child let loose with a material she already knew, given permission to just play with it. And they didn't leave the family tradition to do it. They honored it — the grandfathers, the training, the roots — and still found something entirely their own inside it. Not a rejection. An evolution.

I didn't know any of that when I bought the necklace. I just knew I loved it.

There were other pictures too — Greece. Egypt. Prague. London. A whole passport's worth of a woman who went places, who wore fancy things, who didn't ask permission first.

And I sat there missing the version of me I gave up years ago. ✨Fancy. ✨À version of myself I'd quietly filed away as finished.

Here's the thing I had to sit with: somewhere along the way, I absorbed the idea that a mother is supposed to give her whole life to her children. I watched my own mother live that. And what came with it wasn't just devotion — it was resentment, too. Fear. A loyalty that didn't always look like peace.

I don't want that. I don't have the capacity to give up on my dreams, and for a long time that felt like something to be ashamed of. Like wanting more than the sacrifice made me less of a mother.

But I don't think it does. I think I inherited a script that said “devoted mother” and “fully expressed woman” can't be the same person, and I've been quietly living inside that split without ever agreeing to it.

When I think about who I actually am becoming — my quantum self — she's a present mother. Financially independent. Still married, still in love with her husband. Homes in the U.S. and in Portugal. Her kids thriving in schools that see them. A family that knows how to create its own reality together. A community around her that's a whole ecosystem of self-safe expression and aligned wealth. She's not choosing between fancy and devoted. She's both, at once, without apology.

Marina and Susanna didn't reject their family's glassmaking lineage to make something new. They came from it, played inside it, and still broke the mold. Maybe that's the actual instruction hiding in a box at my mother's house: you don't have to leave the lineage to become something it never made before. Sometimes you just have to let yourself play with what you already know.

The Iconic Soap Bubble Necklace is with me now. It's my fancy piece — proof, not a costume — and I'm going to wear it on camera. 👀 ⬇️

https://youtu.be/eg6oMvI51CQ?is=e0ybhLiVTnFfWI0y

In the pursuit of your dreams,

Take the leap. Your fins will appear.

Best Wishes 🦋✨

Alexa Fernandes | The Quantum Mermaid