Patrick Antosh : "If you notice, Brian wears that little Conch Shell bracelet thing. [Ed.: It's actually a  cowry shell bracelet]. I never thought anything of it for the whole year... the first day we started shooting again, all the extras showed up, and there was like seven guys that had them, so obviously you can buy them anywhere, and it must be directed from the show. I didn't do that on purpose." [from an earlier interview with Michel Chantelois of SoGayTV]

If you didn’t notice Brian’s bracelet, maybe you should be more careful when you’re watching Queer as Folk, because you can’t miss it. But why should you focus on a simple bracelet when you can focus on some way more interesting things? Because I think this bracelet is more important than one can imagine.
There is nothing extraordinary about its history.

It’s been bought by Brian in Mexico and his initials are carved on one of the shells. That’s all we know, it’s just a bracelet. And it appears in the first episode as an insignificant prop. So insignificant that no one seemed to notice the coherence issues it’s induced because it keeps appearing and disappearing during the first Brian-Justin scenes.

Brian out of Babylon with his bracelet.

Then at home without it...

With it again when he takes off his pants.

And it disappeared in the next shot...

Until episode 111, Brian doesn’t wear this bracelet constantly. He doesn’t wear it at work for example, nor at the gym. Then again, nothing seems to indicate that this object has any special meaning. However, since episode 112, the bracelet is omnipresent. I won’t say Brian wears it all the time because it can’t be proved, but we don’t see him not wearing it anymore. He’s wearing it at work, at the gym, at home, everywhere… Just like it became a fetish object, a part of Brian’s character.

Then comes episode 219 where Brian realizes that Justin is having an affair, and where Ted realizes his biggest fantasy : being Brian Kinney for one night. On this occasion Brian loans him his bracelet (which by the way shows us how important this object is in the Brian Kinney outfit). Once the bracelet is back to its owner, it mysteriously disappears. I mean Brian doesn’t wear it anymore.

It will come back a couple of times though.
In episode 301 for example we can see the bracelet on Brian’s wrist while he’s waiting for Justin’s "double". But if you really pay attention to this scene, you’ll notice that this shot of Brian on his bed is in fact a shot from episode 215 (when Brian is waiting for Justin to come back from Michael’s).

episode 215

episode 301

Did the director –the same for both episode 215 and 301- want to give the scene a flashback effect? Or was it just due to technical issues? (Who knows, maybe Gale Harold was sick that day and couldn’t shoot this scene again) It doesn’t really matter anyway. Even if the first option seems to be the most credible, I guess we’ll never know the truth about that, and therefore we’ll never know whether the bracelet was supposed to be there or not.

However, the bracelet is making its comeback in episode 304 where it’s one of the main characters. Not on Brian’s wrist though, on his nephew’s who stole it. What’s strange in this scene is the way the bracelet stands on a table with Brian’s keys and cellphone, like he still wears it all the time, but we know he doesn’t…

Anyway, at the end of the episode, Justin puts the infamous object back on Brian’s wrist. And once again the bracelet disappears in the next episode, and for good this time.

I don’t know if this object and its presence or absence mean anything. We can find a lot of scenaristic or technical reasons for this afterall. Maybe Brian simply got tired of wearing it, or maybe the PA lost it and had to buy another one especially for episode 304. We could also think that Gale Harold got allergic to the bracelet and couldn’t wear it anymore. But I don’t want to believe that it’s just a coincidence –first and foremost because it would mean that I spent hours analyzing this for no good reason! Brian stopped wearing the bracelet at a very significant point of the story: Justin’s "betrayal.” And according to me, if this "fetish" object that’s been a part of the character during so many episodes suddenly disappears, it might be a way to show us that Brian evolved and grew up. That Brian-Kinney-the-seducer is slowly turning into someone more "natural" and opened, without any prop…
Or maybe he just didn’t want to wear a bracelet worn by Ted! Because knowing Brian, he probably thinks this little experiment kinda spoiled the charms of this bracelet.