How Long Should My Necklace Be?

Buying jewelry online can be difficult - often because you cannot check the lengths of interesting pieces up against your body. Handmade jewelry often comes in non-standard sizes as well - which is GREAT!! when you're a non-standard size yourself, but how do you determine what size that you need? 

Measuring Jewelry
Many handmade jewelry artisans measure their jewelry based on the linear length of the piece. So, for example, 

• a bracelet may be laid out on a flat surface and measured from end to end to come up with its length measurement. 
• Same thing for a necklace or anklet. 
• Earrings are often measured from the top to bottom, but pay attention to the information in a listing as some artisans measure the dangle of the earring rather than the entire piece.

This method of measurement is easy and intuitive. As a result, you can measure yourself with a piece of string (that you then measure with a ruler etc) or a flexible tape measure to determine how long you prefer your various styles of jewelry to be. I prefer a string as it drapes a bit more like jewelry would and can give you a more realistic length to allow for comfort as well.

You can either measure yourself to see what lengths you prefer or check to see what the length offered would look or feel like with your string. REMEMBER!! Artisan jewelry can often have lengths adjusted to your needs at little to no additional cost.

I know, I know - sounds like a lot of effort to figure out your size ranges. Reality is that it will help you with local as well as online purchases and only needs to be done once! 

TIP: For bulky jewelry items, the length measurement can be a bit misleading if the bulk of the jewelry item would cause the circumference of the piece to be substantially less than its measured length. In these cases, you will want to look at the sizing of the bulky part and subtract that from the length to see if the end length will still work for you. 

So, what is your preferred necklace length?


Tape Measure photo: By Simon A. Eugster (Own work) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons