When the New York jeweler Brent Neale Winston titled her debut fine jewelry collection After the Rain, it was an emotional response to what she calls “a really bad year.” During months of prescribed bed rest while pregnant with her twin daughters, Winston had channeled her energy into the research and development of a new line of jewelry, resulting in cheery rainbow, cloud and unicorn shapes in pastel semiprecious stones. “I wanted to make pieces that made me smile and were joyful — with as much color as I could possibly use,” she says of the collection, which introduced the Brent Neale jewelry line with an exclusive trunk show for the online retailer Moda Operandi in 2017.

Since then, Winston’s work has proved a lighthearted antidote to current trends in fine jewelry, which has recently been dominated by a safe mix of classic stones, like pearls and white diamonds. Instead, Winston often employs numerous colors in a single design — using carved stones to frame faceted gems, and layering jewels so as to reveal themselves at unexpected angles — a daring direction that has landed her jewelry in fashionable boutiques from Fivestory on the Upper East Side to Forty Five Ten in Dallas.

Winston, 38, traces her passion for fine jewelry to her childhood visits to the vintage markets and gem fairs outside of Washington, D.C. On one particularly memorable trip in high school, she recalls becoming “mesmerized by a strand of rubies.” Winston’s mother noticed her marveling at the display’s glittering contents and encouraged her to experiment with beads. “I guess it all started from there,” says Winston, whose small designs for friends and family were quickly picked up by the East Hampton boutique Bonne Nuit, eventually landing her a job creating private-label designs for big-box stores across the country.