“I couldn’t find anything but very cheaply made items, but my friends were still interested, so I thought I’d create bracelets for them and the business grew from there.” “My girlfriends all loved her bracelet and asked me to please get them one,” Ms. There is no way to quantify how many evil-eye amulets there are in world, but it is hard to dispute their popularity. “There is nothing more dreaded by the people, nor considered more deadly in its effects, than the Evil Eye,” Lady Jane Francesca Wilde (the playwright’s mother) wrote in her 1887 book, “Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland.” And Today Many historians have theorized that, as dark-eyed people were the norm in the region, those with blue eyes were considered most skilled at using the evil eye, likely leading to the prominent use of blue in protective amulets.īut the evil eye also appeared in both Celtic and Polish folklores. Glass beads appeared in the Mediterranean in about 1500 B.C., as glass production became more sophisticated, and evil-eye beads became popular among the Phoenicians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans and Ottomans. In “The Evil Eye: The Origins and Practices of Superstitions,” written in 1895, Frederick Elworthy said, “It is firmly believed by all ancients that some malignant influence darted from the eyes of envious or angry persons, and so infected the air as to penetrate and corrupt the bodies of both living creatures and inanimate objects.” (He also wrote of the ancient Egyptians and their use of the Eye of Osiris, one of their gods, in amulets to protect them against evil magic, both during life and in the afterlife.)Īnd the Old Testament of the Bible refers to the evil eye in Proverbs 23:6, cautioning, “Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an evil eye, neither desire thou his dainty meats.”

The desire for protection against the evil eye is nothing new.Īmulets in the shape of idols with incised eyes made by the Mesopotamians were discovered during excavations in Syria and date to 3300 B.C. In fact, when Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, was seen wearing an Alemdara evil-eye necklace and then a bracelet during her trip to Africa this fall - the latter (was it deliberate?) on the day when the public learned she had filed suit against a British newspaper for publishing a private letter - it became clear that the style had entered the fashion mainstream. So the allure goes way beyond high school backpack charms or something for Coachella.

Does the bible say eye for an eye