Discover the symbols of the world

Camille G.

Camille G. founded Loch Ness in 2013, where she designs and hand-makes symbolic jewelry. She’s also a full-stack developer — the same hands that shape each piece also built and coded the healing crystal bracelet configurator featured across this site, along with the tools at Loch Ness Lab. This blog is where that dual perspective, craft and code, comes together.

Must Read
Categories

New INTERACTIVE Book

STRATES: The history of France from another angle: let’s forget the history of the powerful.

A Loch Ness column

Verified or Vibes?

We publicly check the cultural, historical and material claims on our own products — real sources, no invented translations. If we can’t verify something, we say so.

🟢 VERIFIED

The claim checks out against a real source.

🟡 PARTIAL

Part of the claim holds. Part doesn’t.

🔴 VIBES ONLY

The claim doesn’t hold up on inspection.

⚪ OPEN

Still investigating — reader input welcome.

Read the audits →
How it works Our verification methodology ▾

Every “Verified or Vibes?” post follows the same process, whether the answer takes an afternoon or several weeks. Here’s exactly how a claim moves from “we don’t know” to a published verdict.

1. We isolate the exact claim

We quote the actual listing exactly as sold and check each individual claim it makes separately — a listing can be right about one detail and wrong about another.

2. We check the physical object first

Close, well-lit photos of the specific detail in question, isolated from decorative elements that can confuse both human eyes and recognition tools.

3. We compare against reference sources, not memory

Museum glossaries, academic or encyclopedic references, and recognition tools built for the specific writing system involved — never “this looks about right.”

4. We ask people who would actually know

For anything a database can’t settle, we bring it to communities with real fluency or lived expertise, stating plainly what we don’t know when we ask.

5. One answer isn’t enough

A single confident reply doesn’t earn a 🟢 Verified badge. We need at least two independent confirmations that agree; one unconfirmed lead gets 🟡 Partially Verified at most.

6. The verdict changes the listing, not just the article

If a claim doesn’t hold up, the product description gets corrected too — not just the blog post.

7. Updates are dated and visible, not silent

When a badge changes after publication, the post gets a dated update note explaining what changed and how, with credit to anyone who helped. Nothing gets quietly rewritten.

Why bother with all this. Most of what we sell or write about isn’t a high-stakes claim on its own. But the habit of checking rather than assuming doesn’t change with the subject — it’s the same whether we’re looking at a bracelet, a tool, an ingredient, or anything else we put our name on.