Yu (Rainia) Gan is a creative design practitioner with a background in Jewellery Design from the London College of Fashion.
She is currently completing the Innovation Design Engineering double master’s degree jointly offered by Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art.
Her early practice was rooted in visual aesthetics and personal narrative, creating jewellery that translated emotion into form.
Over time, her curiosity expanded beyond beauty and storytelling toward a more critical and interdisciplinary approach — exploring how craft, material, and technology can work together to question traditions and reimagine systems of value.

Drawing from biology, materials science, and engineering, she now uses design as a reflective and investigative process that connects art, science, and ethics.
Rainia’s work is driven by the belief that the well-being of humans and non-humans is deeply interconnected, and that design can act as a bridge, not only to imagine more sustainable futures, but to challenge the ways we define progress and responsibility today.

Nupearl Lab continues the exploration of Limespearl, a project that began as an experiment in transforming everyday waste into new materials. Limescale itself is one of the smallest yet most tangible deposits of time in daily life. Formed through water, minerals, and human activity, it quietly records the passage of time through cycles of use and removal.

By collecting and analysing limescale from domestic environments, a residue often regarded as “dirt”, the project develops a sustainable way of growing vegan pearls, offering an alternative free from animal involvement. In this process, the material’s memory is reactivated: it escapes the cycle of consumption and erasure to become both a crystallisation of time and a trace of human presence.

As an evolution of this material exploration, Nupearl Lab expands into a collection of contemporary jewellery pieces that combine industrial precision with a laboratory aesthetic, symbolizing the origins of both limescale and Nupearls.