Luxury French jewelry house Boucheron celebrates the fragile essence of biological life with the unveiling of its latest annual high jewelry Carte Blanche series, “Impermanence.” Inspired by Japan’s art of floral arrangement, Ikebana, as well as its philosophy of wabi-sabi—a Japanese doctrine that finds beauty in the imperfection by embracing the natural cycle of growth and decay—Boucheron illustrates the beautiful characteristics that come with organic maturation, presented by the creation of six botanical compositions.

A labor of over 18,000 hours of fine craftsmanship, these six precious compositions break apart into 28 wearable jewelry sculptures—each meshing couture with high end art. The collection is intended to build off the maison’s newfound interest in the organic world—which was first recognized in the January debut of Boucheron’s Histoire de Style Collection, “Untamed Nature,”—while also seeking to achieve a more personal interpretation for Claire Choisne, who’s led Boucherons’s creative direction since 2011.

With a passion to capture the impermanence beauty of botany, the frozen compositions blur the boundary between the ephemeral and the eternal: “These six compositions illustrate nature’s fleetingness, shifting from light to shadow to highlight how precious it is,” Choisne says on her sensitive design approach. “The collection is an ode to that fragile instant that I wanted to crystallize for eternity.”

Compositions are presented in reverse—ranging from number six being the lightest to number one being the darkest—a true embodiment of how nature is gradually vanishing, fading as it ages, ultimately succumbing to pitch blackness by the end of its natural cycle. From the daintiness of a tulip, eucalyptus and dragonfly coming together, to the casting of a poppy, sweet pea and butterfly sinking into darkness, each arrangement immortalizes Earth’s biological matter while prompting dialogue of their role amid the depths of our ecosystem.