Travel is the best education, people always say, and Sanaz Doost says the 12 years she spent as a global nomad were among the most informative in terms of determining her personality and cementing her decision to become a jewelry designer.
Doost was born and raised in Shiraz, a southwestern Iran city synonymous with gardens, poetry, and wine. To learn more about herself without familial constraints, Doost left home at age 19 “to explore the free world, study art and design and pursue my dreams,” she says.
During her travels, Doost lived in Cyprus, Malaysia, Turkey, France, Singapore, the Netherlands, Indonesia, and Canada to name a few. During those years, she studied art, photography, industrial design, and, eventually, goldsmithing and jewelry arts.
It is that blend of nonstop travel from East to West—as well as her personal exploration of jewelry-making across regions, countries, and continents—that led her to establish Sanaz Doost Jewelry. With her Toronto atelier, Doost says she feels settled, finally.
Her eponymous brand is known for its intricate designs and Persian influences. Doost describes it as “preserving the beauty of Eastern heritage with a Western twist.” Those influences include touches from her early days, her nomadic years, and her current fascinations, Doost says.
“My parents were engineers and university professors in Iran, and engineering, medicine, and teaching runs in the family,” Doost says. “I was only interested in art, and, unfortunately, art is kind of a forbidden word in Eastern families. Parents and even society accept it only as a hobby and expect everyone to become doctors and engineers.”
For Doost, art was an escape, a way to craft her own world using whatever materials she could find as a young person.
“It took me to a whole other realm, and I found light through it,” Doost says. “Middle Eastern families buy and gift gold for every occasion, even for kids, so my first jewelry memory is a necklace and earrings my parents gifted me for my first birthdays. But my first jewelry-making memory is when I was making necklaces and earrings with eucalyptus leaves, sour cherry, and grapes when I was in kindergarten.”
After a few disastrous science classes that cemented Doost’s decision to study art, she graduated from high school and began her travels. She got her bachelor’s in industrial and product design in 2010 from Eastern Mediterranean University, which resulted in some full-time work as a freelance industrial designer.
Yet that one course on ancient goldsmithing she took during those college years pulled at her.
“Industrial design was a bit tough for me—full of calculation, factory visits, and an industrial environment,” Doost says. “But jewelry design was smooth, and it gave me freedom to be as creative as I wanted—to be colorful, be myself, and express my feelings, thoughts, and beliefs. To be me!”
When she settled in Canada in 2017, Doost got an advance diploma of jewelry arts from George Brown College of Toronto.
Doost debuted her jewelry line in 2020, and it has been thrilling to work with these precious materials daily, she says. Since then, she has opened her first showroom in downtown Toronto, participated in major jewelry events, and shown her work in exhibits including Toronto Fashion Week, Milano Jewelry Week, and New York Jewelry Week.
“Designing jewelry brought back color and light to my life,” Doost says. “I think my background in industrial design gave me the ability to pair the form and function into ergonomic, elegant, bold, and sculptural jewelry that is meant to last forever.”
Top: Sanaz Doost explored the world to find herself, resulting in her current work as a jewelry designer in Toronto, where she blends her Persian heritage with Western influences. (Photos courtesy of Sanaz Doost)
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