Annoushka Ducas Counts Rihanna and Kate Middleton as Fans – the Celebrity Jewellery Designer Behind Links of London on Fundraising for Disadvantaged Young Women and Delivering Drones to the Ukrainian Army

“It was an incredibly helpful process,” she recalls. “I didn’t train, and my drawings are pretty ghastly,” she admits, “but I can visualise very strongly.” This skill helped her launch her fine jewellery brand in the UK in 2009 three years after the couple had sold Links of London.

Rings, ring jackets that elevate an engagement ring and earrings are some of her bespoke offerings, but clients can also really have fun with her witty charms, which she also offers to order and which have gained Annoushka a reputation for being the “Queen of Charms”.

She has even launched a podcast, My Life in Seven Charms, in which she designs adorable, jewelled charms that mark milestones in her interviewee’s lives. For instance, master chef Angela Hartnett’s charms included a gold piece of pasta, a chef’s knife and a wooden chopping board; while for Alice Temperley, Annoushka created a cider bottle locket and a ruby apple as the fashion designer was brought up on a cider farm.

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“Recently I made a red telephone box charm because the client proposed to his girlfriend from one,” Ducas says. “There is no limit to the imagination. It is all part of the storytelling of one’s life.”

She has recently introduced her Knuckle collection of interlinkable 14k gold chains in Hong Kong. It’s her first gender-fluid range and is proving popular with all genders, but she has noticed, “Men in Hong Kong have been much quicker to adopt the collection.” It is the same for her Crown rings – those set with black and white diamonds are especially popular with male customers. Their girlfriends, meanwhile, snap up the colourful sapphire Crown rings and Marguerite eternity bands set in a rainbow of colours.

Ducas uses her platform as a designer to help promote education and training opportunities for disadvantaged young women. So far, she’s raised HK$21 million (US$2.7 million) through the The Brilliant Breakfast initiative, which she launched four years ago for The Prince’s Trust. “We’ve helped over 1,800 young women with the Women Supporting Women network and I am pretty proud of that,” she says.

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This summer, she joined her son Oscar on a very different humanitarian venture. They drove across Europe in a convoy to Lviv in Ukraine to deliver a 4x4 pickup truck full of drones, spades and other items requested by the Ukrainian army. “They will be used to take wounded soldiers and members of the public to hospital, and to launch drone strikes,” she says, realities brought home on that journey when she met a woman who had lost all three of her sons, all aged under 26.

Ducas says that running a jewellery brand – handling beautiful gemstones, selling dreams and marking special moments in people’s lives – already feels a privilege in so many ways. Her up-close experience of the war has only underlined that. “I feel it is essential to do something,” she says simply, describing seeing it for herself as “unbelievably moving”.