The process behind Amema's jewelry starts in thrift stores, flea markets, and the back shelves of vintage shops. We're looking for small objects (old toys, figurines, charms, trinkets) that carry a specific quality. Character, not monetary value.
A chipped porcelain dog with one ear. A plastic dinosaur from a vending machine, sun-faded to the color of old paper. A metal charm from a bracelet someone wore in the 1970s. These things have been handled, played with, forgotten, and rediscovered. They have a texture of lived experience that new objects lack.
We 3D scan them, and then we 3D print them in full color. The result is a wearable version of the object, a charm sized for a necklace, that reproduces the shape and the surface: the paint chips, the worn edges, the specific way light hits a forty-year-old toy.
This is the basic version of the process. The fuller version is stranger.
Scanning
We use structured-light 3D scanners to capture the objects. The scanner projects a pattern of light onto the surface and reads the deformation of that pattern to calculate the three-dimensional geometry. Simultaneously, cameras capture the color and texture of the surface. The output is a 3D mesh with a photographic texture mapped onto it, a digital replica of the physical object.
Scanning small objects is finicky. You need consistent lighting, a turntable, and patience. The scanner struggles with shiny surfaces, deep undercuts, and anything transparent. Some objects need to be dusted with a matte spray to reduce reflections. Others need multiple scan passes stitched together. The digital file almost always needs cleanup: filling holes, smoothing artifacts, correcting texture seams.
The scans are never perfect, and that's important. The imperfections of the scanning process (slight blurring of texture, softened edges, the occasional geometric glitch) become part of the object's character. They're the fingerprints of the translation process.
Collage
Here's where it gets interesting. Instead of printing single scanned objects, we combine them.
One method we developed is physical rather than digital. We take several objects (a scanned vintage toy, a found charm, a 3D printed piece from a previous round) and temporarily join them together using Sculpey clay. The clay holds them in position just long enough to scan the whole arrangement as a single unified object.
After scanning, the clay is peeled off. The original objects are unharmed and can be recombined in new arrangements. But the scan captures the union: the objects fused together into a single mesh, their surfaces blending at the joints, their textures flowing into each other.
Another method of compositing is a proprietary digital collage process. This allows us to "blend" the styles of different scans together to create unique children that share the features of multiple real artifacts.
We print these composite scans. The result is an object that never existed as a single thing in the physical world, a collision of multiple objects and multiple histories, merged through the scanning process into something new. A great depression era celluloid horse fused to a ceramic flower fused to a metal key, all reproduced as a single continuous surface in full color.
This process can repeat. The printed composite can be collaged with new objects, scanned again, and printed again. Each generation accumulates more material, more texture, more history. The objects grow.
Printing
Most of our charms are produced using HP Multi Jet Fusion, which prints in full-color nylon. The material is light and durable enough for daily wear. The colors tend toward earthier, more muted tones, which works well for objects based on scans of old, weathered things.
For select archive pieces and limited editions, we use gypsum-based ColorJet Printing. Those prints come out of the machine buried in a bed of white powder. We excavate them carefully, blow off the loose dust, and infiltrate them with a hardening agent. The gypsum material has a weight and warmth that nylon doesn't, closer to carved stone or compressed chalk. We reserve it for designs where that specific quality matters.
Both processes produce matte surfaces with color embedded in the material rather than sitting on top of it. The colors have a depth and mutedness that feels more organic than synthetic.
Assembly
The printed charms are attached to chains (vintage chains when we can find them, new ones when we can't). The pairing of a matte 3D print with a metal chain creates an interesting tension. The chain reads as traditional jewelry; the charm reads as something else entirely. Together they produce an object that occupies its own category, somewhere between jewelry, sculpture, and toy.
We also make necklaces with multiple charms that customers can select and arrange themselves through our online customizer. The customizer lets you build a necklace in 3D, choosing from our catalog of scanned objects and placing them along the chain. The digital preview uses the same 3D models that were used to produce the physical prints.
Why This Process
The obvious way to make 3D printed jewelry is to design something in CAD software: model a pendant, render it, print it. That's what most 3D printed jewelry companies do. The results are clean, precise, and look exactly like what you'd expect from a computer.
We go the other direction. We start with things that already exist and have already been through the world. The 3D scanner and printer are translation tools in our process. They take an object from one material reality and reconstitute it in another.
The process is also generative in a way that digital design can't be. When you collage physical objects and scan the result, you get outcomes you couldn't have planned: textures bleeding into each other, geometries intersecting at unexpected angles, surfaces carrying the ghost of the scanning process itself. There's a controlled randomness to it. The hand is involved at every stage, but the machine introduces its own variables.
Walter Benjamin wrote about the collector's desire to "renew the old world" through the act of acquiring things. He was talking about books, but the idea applies to any object with a history. When you find a vintage toy at a flea market and bring it into your collection, you're drawing its past into your present. When we scan that toy and reprint it as a charm, we're doing the same thing, literally rebirthing the object through the machine, carrying its surface and character into a new material form.
The resulting jewelry pieces are artifacts of this process. They carry the history of the original objects, the traces of the scanning and printing process, and the specific material quality of whichever printing technology was used. They're collages of past and present held together by a chain around your neck.
Browse our collection of 3D printed charm necklaces, or build your own using our online customizer. Each charm is made from 3D scans of vintage objects, printed in full-color nylon or gypsum.