So according to Gen Z and social media, Pandora is officially cool again!? As someone who had an OG charm bracelet when she was a teenager, Kelly Meharg looks into the resurgence and does things a little differently this time around…
Somewhere in a drawer at my parents’ house, there’s a sterling silver Pandora bracelet with an orange theme – orange Murano glass, orange enamel, an orange stone or two, all crammed onto the classic chain with no rhyme or reason. I’d committed to a colour story before I knew what a “colour story” was, and I wore that bracelet with the kind of unembarrassed devotion only a 15-year-old can achieve because it was, for me, the coolest bloody thing I owned.
Every charm meant something in that really deep, earnest way things used to mean back then. One was a birthday, one came from a mate who’s still a mate and at least one was bought with netball umpiring money in a fit of impatience because the milestones were not arriving fast enough for my liking. It was a wearable diary written by a girl convinced she’d already lived a great deal of life (lol) and then, somewhere in my twenties, it went into that drawer while I moved on to jewellery I had decided was more grown up (or that I bought at Diva with my meagre Glassons paycheck).
But now, after a gold Pandora bracelet, a gold necklace and five charms turned up on my desk last month, gifted from Pandora’s PR company, I think I’ve come full circle. Are we back on the Pandora bandwagon? Yes, apparently – but I’m extremely late to the party.
Officially, Pandora is cool again
After a bit of Googling and asking my more fashionable friends, it turns out yes, Pandora has gone through a revolution – The Hollywood Reporter notes that Pandora is “trending again” on the strength of its charm bracelets, with singer and Grammy-winner Tyla signed as its newest ambassador and Pamela Anderson (who is also back?!) fronting an earlier campaign. Marie Claire UK declared in January that after more than a decade of minimalism and clean-girl energy, charm bracelets are back, tipping them as one of the biggest jewellery trends of spring/summer 2026 and listing Pandora first among the brands to buy them from. Stylist has them in its forecast too, noting they turned up on the spring/summer catwalks at Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Chloé and Bottega Veneta.
Liz Teich, of The New York Stylist, told Business Insider that after years of restrained, minimal pieces, “we are starting to see a little bit more personality and fashion”.
I mean, for scale, this is not some plucky little brand clawing its way back. Pandora sits behind only Cartier and Tiffany & Co in global jewellery sales, and Marie Claire cited a mid-2025 valuation of US$69.67 billion, via a Yahoo Finance report. It never actually went anywhere – what’s changed is how we feel about it.
“I think Pandora’s always been cool”
That, verbatim and with an exclamation mark, is what Jess Donovan, Pandora’s ANZ Marketing Director, says when I ask her what flipped. It’s a great party line from a marketing gal, but she has an interesting theory behind it.
“The way our jewellery can be chosen and styled and worn as such a unique and personal marker of identity is a big reason why people fell in love with our brand,” she says. “If I think about what has changed in the last few years, I’d say culture has sort of shifted from this very polished and top down curation of what is ‘cool’ and has brought us back to a place where showing up authentically and being able to express who you are is so much more important again. There is so much community in self-expression and creativity, and so that value that Pandora has always held has become so much more relevant again.”
It’s true that culture is correcting away from pandemic-era minimalism – we’ve spent years being told that taste meant restraint, that the correct jewellery was a whisper-thin chain and one very tasteful signet, and that anything sentimental or literal or (God forbid) fun was a bit try-hard or kitsch. Then the pendulum swung, and a wrist that tells you five things about a person became more interesting than a wrist that tells you nothing at all.
Gen Z started it but then we came running
The catalyst? Gen Z getting hold of Y2K, deciding it was aspirational as opposed to cringy, and then buying the exact jewellery we were buying when we were their age and younger (they didn’t live through the Groovy Chick bedspread/lava lamp/blow-up chair phase, so I guess there’s more room for cute!?).
“Nostalgia is not necessarily new, I remember being a teenager and idealising anything from the 80s, much to my mum’s horror!” Jess says. “This Y2K resurgence feels like it’s definitely coming from a younger audience who may not have experienced it first-hand but is connecting in some ways to that world where things were simpler and, I guess, a lot more free in many ways.”
But for once, what Gen Z deems cool comes with an advantage for us millennials, because we’ve actually lived through this aesthetic. Where they’re wearing a reference, we’re wearing memories, coupled with taste that’s been tested and a sense of who we actually are. (I’ll never forget going to a party where some young gals came dressed as the 2010s and bought their outfits from a costume store, whereas I just dug through my archive, which was humbling.)
The turnaround with a name
None of this was luck, and the business story underneath the vibe shift is actually really interesting. Pandora had a rough 2019 with sales sliding, and launched a reinvention so comprehensive it got a name, the Phoenix strategy, built on pushing beyond charms into a full jewellery offering. It has since strung together stretch after stretch of double-digit organic growth in a market that has been brutal for almost everybody else – it has worked exclusively with lab-grown diamonds since 2022, and in 2025 it launched Talisman, a collection inspired by ancient coins. Chief executive Berta de Pablos-Barbier framed that one as a chance to “re-enchant something that has always been there for us”, which is a very elegant way of noting that humans have been wearing meaningful little objects for most of recorded history.
Jess is careful about the “full jewellery brand” language, and makes the point that it was never a pivot away from anything. “Pandora has truly always been a full jewellery brand,” she says. “One of the blessings, but I guess challenges, of being so famous for one big thing (in our case charms) is that sometimes people don’t notice all the rest.”
If you want proof of how much this stuff means to people, spend ten minutes on TikTok, and you’ll inevitably come across a “charm tour” video: a woman holding up her wrist and walking you through her entire life in beads, one memory at a time. It is oddly intimate, almost confessional, and they serve as a storytelling method that’s rather, pardon the pun, charming.
The haul, and the very strange feeling of it
So, what I have in this new era: a gold bracelet and a gold necklace to hang it all from, and a letter K and a letter M from the new mini alphabet range, tiny and just legible enough to feel like a secret. A textured shell mini, because my happy place is always at the beach. An articulated fish dangle that moves when you move, which I thought was just incredibly cool, and I could imagine it as a quirky but chic addition to an all-black business outfit.
Pandora now offers in-store engraving, and when I asked Jess about the favourite charm she’s ever made, she told me about one designed by her nine-year-old daughter after the two of them ran their first 14km race together last year. Her daughter drew a little picture of everything she didn’t want to forget about the day, and they had it engraved so they could keep it forever. Mine is an openable envelope dangle in 14k gold-plating with cubic zirconia on the front, which unfolds so you can hide a message inside, and I plan to engrave a little note in mine.
Laid out on my kitchen bench, the whole lot looks NOTHING like the orange situation of 2006. It looks, and I say this as a woman genuinely startled by it, chic. Smaller, warmer, more golden and more intentional, these are charms for a woman who finally knows who she is, rather than a girl who thought she knew everything.
The feeling, though, is identical, and one I’d forgotten. I stood there choosing an initial and a fish and a little envelope to put a private message in, doing precisely what I did at 15 – trying my best to tell my story.
Man, what would 15-year-old me have made of 35-year-old me? She’d be confused as to why she was wearing gold for a start – it was “tacky” back then, she reckoned – but would she be proud of the story I’m now telling? Would she be absolutely floored, and giddy, and shocked by what this new iteration of charms represents? Would she be hapy?
I suspect she’d be thrilled to learn that the woman she turned into still can’t resist a charm, though. Some things you don’t grow out of, I guess – you just grow into a gold version.