A Critique of Necklace Clasps
Necklaces have been around since the 1700s and were one of the first ways in which humans adorned their bodies. The necklaces from back then look very different then the ones we currently wear but the necklace clasps have remained the same. On more than one occasion, a hard to open/use necklace clasp has caused me to arrive a few minutes late to class, an appointment, or any other scheduled event. This inconvenience has been accepted as a part of my everyday routine, but why are these clasps so hard to use?
Why are necklace clasps designed the way that they are?
Some of the earliest necklaces used large spring ring clasps, fish hook clasps and barrel clasps. From there we continued to improve the design of a necklace clasp and we started using lobster claw and smaller smaller spring ring clasps in the 1900s. These new designs have reduced the time it would take for someone to close a necklace but there are still some issudesignes the current designs cause.
Positive and Negative aspects of the design:
A closed clasp made of metal is very secure which means that it is almost impossible for someone to steal your necklace by pulling it off of your neck. Although strong, the tiny clasp does pose other accessibility problems. Users with poor eyesight often find it difficult to see a clasp so small and they find it even harder to use the clasp to close the necklace around their necks. Even able-bodied users sometimes find it hard to use necklace clasps on shorter necklaces and often use a mirror for help aligning the two sides.
Usability Principles:
Although inconvenient, the current clasps do satisfy the majority of the usability principles. Current necklace clasps are easy to learn how to use and users are able to immediately able to remember how to use them. One possible reason why spring ring clasps are still in use is due to habit. We have been using spring rings since the 1840s to secure our necklaces and back then, it was a very useful necklace clasp design. During that time, many larger spring rings were used to close Victorian lockets and collars. Since the necklaces of that time were much larger than what we have today, it was actually convenient to use a spring ring clasp because the clasp was also larger. As time passed, jewelry became more dainty and people realized that a large bulky spring ring clasp would look out of place on a tiny chain necklace. Therefore the spring ring clasp was decreased in size to fit the design of current necklaces. The issue is that these clasps are not necessarily the optimal design when they have become such a small size.
Design Suggestion:
One feature that could improve the process of opening and closing a necklace is to use magnetic clasps instead of the lobster claw and spring ring clasps. These magnetic clasps could be attached to necklaces using the same rings that are used to attach lobster claw and spring ring clasps. Magnetic clasps would make necklaces more accessible because they are extremely simple to use with or without visual impairments. In the cases where necklaces are shorter, users would also not need to use a mirror to position the two sides of the clasp because the magnets attract each other once they are close enough.
Here is a sketch of what a magnetic clasp could look like. The top drawing is a closed necklace and the bottom two drawings are sketches of each clasp. The purpose of making the magnets interlock is to make the clasp more secure. Interlocking magnets also prevent users from being able to pull a necklace off someone’s neck.
