Pandora Charm Bracelet

One type of charm bracelet which definitely seems on the rise is the pandora charm bracelet. And no, I’m not talking about the jewelry company Pandora, I’m talking about the style of charm bracelet silly! I think maybe its because pandora charms are slightly cheaper than other silver charms – probably because on the whole they are smaller, but anyway I think that there are definitely more girls wearing them now than there used to be, so I thought I’d do a little post about them, plus its been a while…

So, firstly what is a pandora charm bracelet? Well that’s easy. Unlike normal charms which attach to a bracelet by some form of jewelry finding (like a loop, or bail, or jump ring) pandora charms are actually like little beads rather than charms, and the bracelet (normally made from nylon, plastic or elastic) actually goes through the center of the charms. Most pandora charms, although not all of them, are square-ish rather than most beads which seem to be round. This means that the overall bracelet effect is more like an Italian charm bracelet, although obviously slightly different.

I think they look good although I have the same bee in my bonnet about pandora charm bracelets as I do about Italian charm bracelets, they don’t jangle, and that is one of the coolest thing about normal charm bracelets with charms which hang. Anyway, jangle prejudices over, one of the other problems which affects pandora charm bracelets is that you need to have a full set of charms before you can wear it (unless you like the look of the bear plastic strapping which, incidentally, can hurt if you’ve not got charms between it and your wrists). Now, some people like to buy all their charms at once and have a full bracelet and that’s fine if they want, but it does mean that even though the overall price of the full bracelet is probably cheaper with a pandora charm bracelet that a normal silver charm bracelet (one other factor I forgot to mention of course is that a silver charm bracelet actually has an underlying silver bracelet, so obviously its more expensive) you don’t have to shell out for all the charms on a normal silver bracelet at once.

Quite apart from which I think part of the fun of getting a charm bracelet is that you can build up loads of charms over a long period of time. People know you have a charm bracelet so they can give them to you as presents etc and if you have all the charms on your bracelet already then this isn’t possible. Obviously there is nothing to stop you from having a whole pile of extra charms which you can sort of sub-on and sub-off from your bracelet when you like, but again that does away with the money saving side of having a pandora bracelet.

So this is what has annoyed me about pandora bracelets: no noise, and you have to have a full set of charms before you can wear it. There is, I suppose, a sort of solution to the latter problem, which is that some people sell pandora links which are essentially just a square with a loop which allows you to hang conventional charms from them. If you didn’t shell out all at once for all your charms for a pandora charm bracelet then you could at least buy some of these for the empty slots so that you can at least wear the thing and then you could gradually fill it up with conventional hanging charms. But, if you are going to go for this option it does beg the question, why on earth would you not just get a conventional silver charm bracelet to start off with?

Ranting over, I do actually have a couple of pandora charm bracelets, and although I have other bracelets which I love more, they’re both adorable and I love them to bits…