In light of the Harry Potter charm bracelet she designed to benefit charity, J.K. Rowling has penned a piece in Harper’s Bazaar about the healing powers jewelry holds.

Rowling recalls a time as a young girl when one of her aunts told her that “no really nice woman likes jewelry” after receiving a piece for herself. That simple observation left a mark on the author. “What I gained that afternoon along with my new set of clinking charms was an association between wickedness and jewellery that has never entirely left me,” she writes.

“And yet a charm bracelet seems a very innocent trinket, really. What other piece of jewellery is so imbued with memory and sentiment? Why do we call those little master­pieces ‘charms’ if not in allusion to their talismanic properties? They have meaning beyond the mercenary. They are personal amulets.”

Rowling lost this first charm bracelet twenty years after receiving it. “One day a burglar broke into the flat where I was living in Manchester, emptied my old wooden jewellery box and smashed it apart for good measure. I lost not just the bracelet, but the modest collection of jewellery I had inherited from my mother, who had died a mere three months previously.”

“Compared to the loss of my mother, it was nothing, and yet I was devastated. Jewellery does not change, it cannot decay; it is a way of holding tight to the past. To this day, I glance through shop windows at old jewellery in the vague hope that among the tarnished silver I will catch sight of that filigree egg.”

Rowling then goes into a story of a new Potter charm bracelet given to her by her publisher upon the release of Deathly Hallows, and reveals that the piece of jewelry was destroyed that night after signing books. She then discusses her Lumos foundation and why she designed a one-of-a-kind charm bracelet auctioned off through Sotheby’s. Visit Harpers Bazaar for the full piece.