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21 Best Charm Bracelets: Your Buyer’s Guide

Charm bracelets allow you to express your personality and bring added visual interest to any outfit. Discover the best charm bracelets for a fully custom look that suits the individual with something truly personalized.

Price: $ – $
21 Listed Items

How old are charm bracelets?

In a sense, so-called "charm bracelets" are among the earliest forms of jewelry or adornment. There are plenty of examples from the pre-historic period of strings featuring trinkets or pendants made of shells, animal bones, and other natural materials.

Each of these small figures represented something, be it a talisman to ward off bad luck, or as a historical marker for an event in someone's life. According to Wikipedia, evidence suggests people used shells as charms in Africa 75,000 years ago, while the Persians and Assyrians made leather bracelets with tiny charms starting around 600 BC.

If you're talking something more modern, the iconic Pandora charm bracelets with which most people are familiar launched in 2000, beginning in Denmark and coming to the U.S. in 2003.

What do charm bracelets mean?

In various ancient cultures, different charms denoted family, religion, and communal standing. While we may not use them quite this way now, we might choose charms that speak to us in a specific way, either literally with an etched quote, or with an image we associate with someone we love.

The most important meaning for charm bracelets is the one you ascribe to them. You might seek out specific charms that have historical meaning, but if they don't resonate with you, the meaning won't have as much significance.

In this way, charm bracelets can be more tailored and special than the average chain bracelet, which make them excellent, unique gifts. You'll be drawing on a fine tradition when choosing one.

What charm bracelet is best?

There are a few different forms that charm bracelets take. Some are traditionally-designed bracelets on which the jeweler has used charms as an element of the overall design. These are, of course, not meant to change and you are more or less locked into the jeweler's vision for the charms.

Obviously, the Pandora collection is extremely popular, which means that a very wide variety of charms exist for endless possibilities of customization. These are usually based around link or snake style chains.

Though we haven't included any on this list, there's also Italian charm bracelets, which use modular links on a stretchy band, usually 18 links in length. They have a very particular look that isn't as varied as the options on our list, but they could be worth considering.

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Charm bracelets can enhance the meaning of a simple piece of jewelry to something truly personalized.