Beauty Gonzales and the jewelry she wore for the GMA Gala 2023 are being excoriated all across social media as it had been belatedly noticed (according to her Instagram) she was wearing “Centuries-old Gold Neck Piece and Earrings are Excavated Eye and Mouth Covers from distant places like Butuan and Surigao”.
The post of curator and art critic Marian Pastor Roces on Facebook called attention to the ethics of her accessories: Someone tell this woman that the orifice covers she is paying “homage” to are grave robber stuff. Because if these were legally excavated, the pieces would belong to the National Museum or the Bangko Sentral.
If the pieces are not reproductions, how was the jeweler even able to get them? And re-fashioning these sacred gold pieces into a necklace feels just a smidgen of Cruella de Ville and her desire for coat of dalmatians, does it not?
Beauty Gonzales is also a known art collector and her husband Norman Crisologo is an art dealer/curator. When she toured the Gold Squad of “Kadenang Ginto” around her home in 2019, she showed an affinity for reworked religious imagery and iconography as shown by the pieces there that she herself pointed out.
Neither Beauty Gonzales nor the jeweler have made any statements amid growing criticism.