In “Opalite” Taylor Swift turns a synthetic gemstone into an irresistible honest love song.
There’s something wonderfully fitting about Taylor Swift naming a song after a fake stone. Not fake in a derogatory sense, mind you, but manufactured: deliberately created rather than discovered.
On “Opalite,” the third track from her October 2025 album The Life of a Showgirl, Swift uses the man-made opal simulant as a metaphor for the kind of happiness you have to build yourself.
It’s a clever bit of songwriting, the sort of thing that makes you think Swift’s been jotting down words and phrases whenever inspiration strikes. Which, as it turns out, is exactly what she does.
Swift revealed on Capital FM that she’d been stockpiling the word “opalite” in her endless lyric files after learning it was synthetic, just like diamonds can be.
The connection to her fiancé Travis Kelce was immediate. Opal is the birthstone for October, when Kelce celebrates his birthday on the 5th, just two days after the album dropped.
“Travis’s birthstone is an opal. So I’ve always fixated on that. I’ve always loved that stone, and I thought it was a cool metaphor, that it’s a man-made opal and happiness can also be man-made, too. So that’s what the song is about, that juxtaposition of those two,” Swift explained during the interview.
But Swift’s love affair with opals stretches back further than her relationship with the Kansas City Chiefs tight end.
In a 2017 interview with Us Weekly, she shared a touching memory: “My favorite stone is an opal because when I was bullied in school, my mom used to take me to T.J. Maxx after school to look at the opal jewelry. I thought opals were so beautiful, and somehow it made me feel better. We never bought them, just looked.”
That detail adds more depth when you consider the song’s central thesis. Sometimes just looking at something beautiful is enough to change your day.
Reuniting with Swedish production duo Max Martin and Shellback, “Opalite” is an upbeat pop rock song with Europop influences. It’s the first time the trio worked together since Swift’s Reputation era in 2017, and you can hear why she wanted them back.
Swift told TIME in 2014 that she chose Martin because he could help create “sonically cohesive” albums, and “Opalite” proves that chemistry hasn’t faded.
The production with the drums, guitars, omnichord tones, and those infectious hooks that Martin and Shellback have built entire careers on sparkle, reminiscent of their work on Swift’s 1989 era.
The track is cheerful and hooky, with Swift’s vocals perfectly capturing the tension between past heartbreak and cautious optimism. It’s not revolutionary; however, it makes you want to dance in your kitchen.
The song opens with Swift admitting to a bad habit of dwelling on past relationships. Her brother apparently called this “eating out of the trash,” which is both hilarious and brutally accurate.
She sings about living with ghosts and hearing perfect couples spout platitudes like “when you know, you know.”
Then comes the shift. Her mum’s reassurance that things will get better, that she was “dancing through the lightning strikes, sleepless in the onyx night, but now the sky is opalite.”
The imagery is inescapable. Onyx is dark and solid, whilst opalite catches light, shifts colour, gleams with possibility.
The second verse appears to reference Kelce’s past relationships, touching on feeling alone even when you’re with someone who’s more interested in their phone than you.
The line “you were in it for real, she was in her phone” has sparked fan speculation about Kelce’s ex-girlfriend, sports journalist Kayla Nicole, whom he dated on and off for five years before their final split in May 2022.
Whether intentional or not, Swift includes references to former relationships of both herself and Kelce throughout the song, painting a picture of two people who had to learn what they didn’t want before finding what they did.
The bridge offers what might be the song’s thesis statement: “This is just a storm inside a teacup, but shelter here with me, my love. Thunder like a drum, this life will beat you up. This is just a temporary speed bump, but failure brings you freedom, and I can bring you love.”
It’s reassurance without getting to soppy, hanging on to hope while acknowledging that things can be rough. The sort of sentiment that only works when you’ve been through enough relationship turbulence to know the difference between genuine connection and just going through the motions.
“Opalite” has been noted as one of Swift’s first songs to describe a real, current relationship rather than an abstract one.
That grounding in reality gives the track an anchor that some of her more conceptual love songs lack. Kelce himself called it his favourite track from the album, saying “He loves that one” when Swift mentioned it during an interview.
There’s also something refreshing about Swift writing from a place of contentment rather than chaos. The song deals with forgiving yourself for relationships that didn’t work out and giving yourself permission to not have everything figured out. After the emotional marathon of The Tortured Poets Department, “Opalite” feels like coming up for air.
Despite not being released as a single, “Opalite” has performed remarkably well. The song ranked #2 on Reddit’s PopHeads Weekly Hot 50 chart for October 20, 2025, with 258 points and 1,283 listeners.
It reached the top ten in multiple countries including Australia, Vietnam, Switzerland, the Philippines, Denmark, the UK, Malaysia, Norway, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and Singapore.
In the UK, “Opalite” took the second spot on the Official Charts during the album’s release week, whilst “The Fate of Ophelia” topped the chart and “Elizabeth Taylor” came third. This marked the first time Swift occupied the top three positions simultaneously.
“Opalite” works because it understands something essential about modern relationships and happiness. Sometimes the most authentic thing is what you consciously choose to build.
The synthetic stone becomes more meaningful than a natural one precisely because it represents intention and effort.
Swift described the metaphor as exploring how happiness can be created voluntarily, which feels particularly resonant in an era where we’re constantly told to “find ourselves” or wait for the universe to deliver what we need.
“Opalite” suggests that maybe you can just decide to make your own light, craft your own joy, choose to be happy even when the world’s telling you it should be more complicated than that.
It’s a pop song, sure, but it’s also a philosophy wrapped in a three-minute-fifty-five-second package. The fact that it’s about a man-made stone celebrating a very real relationship is just the sort of paradox that makes great songwriting.
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