Resin, honestly

What You Can (and Can't) Preserve in Resin

Written by Nina, founder of Aura Pendants

Almost every week, someone asks me if I can seal something special inside one of my pendants. A flower from a wedding bouquet. A pinch of sand from a honeymoon. A loved one's handwriting. The answer is yes far more often than you would expect. But there is also a short list of things I will gently talk you out of, because I would rather lose a sale than send you a keepsake that clouds over and turns brown within a month.

So here is the honest, maker's guide to what you can preserve in resin, what quietly ruins a piece from the inside, and how to tell the difference before you spend a cent.

The short answer

Resin loves anything dry, stable, and still. It struggles with anything wet, living, or full of trapped air and moisture. Water is the enemy of a forever piece. Once that one rule clicks, the rest of this guide makes sense.

What lasts beautifully in resin

These are the materials that hold their color and shape for a lifetime once they are sealed:

• Dried and pressed flowers. Properly dried botanicals keep their shape and most of their color for years.
• Metals, gears, and gold leaf. They never react, and they catch the light from inside the piece.
• Crystals, minerals, and stone chips like turquoise. Stable, beautiful, and full of meaning.
• Glass, sea glass, and beads. Inert and luminous, perfect for ocean-inspired designs.
• Sand and small shells, as long as they are rinsed and completely dry first.
• Paper keepsakes such as tickets, notes, and handwriting, sealed before pouring so the ink does not bleed.
• Ashes from a person or a beloved pet, added as a tasteful pinch and handled with care.
• Baby teeth and locks of hair, cleaned and fully dried.
• Ethically sourced insects and wings that have been properly dried and cured.

What you should never preserve in resin

This is the list I am protective about, because these are the items that look fine on day one and betray you by week four:

• Fresh flowers and leaves. Still full of moisture, they brown, wilt, and rot inside the resin. They must be dried first.
• Fruit and food. A strawberry is water and sugar wrapped in a skin, which is a recipe for mold, fog, and decay. This is why I will never preserve a strawberry for you, no matter how pretty the idea sounds.
• Anything wet, oily, or greasy. Moisture reacts with curing resin and creates bubbles, cloudiness, and yellowing.
• Anything alive. It belongs in the world, not sealed away.

The in-between: things that work only with the right prep

Some of the most stunning inclusions live in a middle zone. They are gorgeous in resin, but only if they are prepared correctly first. Skip the prep and they fail.

• Flowers, when fully dried with silica gel rather than simply pressed, keep more of their three-dimensional shape.
• Insects and botanicals, when completely dried and sometimes sealed before pouring.
• Organic mementos, when stabilized so no moisture is left to react.

That preparation is not a shortcut you can rush. It is part of why a real handmade pendant takes days, not minutes.

The most meaningful things to preserve

The pieces I am most honored to make are the ones nobody else could replace. A ticket from the night two people met. Sand from the beach where someone got engaged. A few strands of a child's first haircut. A drop of breast milk, opalized and luminous. A pinch of ashes so a loved one can stay close.

These are not products. They are memories made wearable, sealed so they last a lifetime. If you have something like that, I would be honored to build a piece around it. You can start a custom keepsake here.

Why preparation is half the craft

Knowing what not to preserve is just as important as knowing what to use. Every Aura Pendant is poured, cured, shaped, and polished by hand over roughly five days, layer by layer. That slow process is what lets me control clarity, color, and longevity, and it is the reason no two pieces are ever exactly alike. When you choose carefully and prepare properly, a pendant becomes something you can pass down, not something you replace.

Frequently asked questions