ถ้อยคำนาซาร์nazarنَظَر

The phrase that keeps it away is its own small piece of evidence. In India and Pakistan the Hindi-Urdu chashm-e-baddoor — 'may the evil eye keep away' — is said aloud, without any object involved at all. The bead is the same sentence in glass.

What the bead is is described the same way by everyone selling it: handmade glass, concentric circles or teardrops in dark blue, white, light blue and black, sometimes edged yellow or gold. Wikipedia's article quotes the recipe as “a mixture of molten glass, iron, copper, water, and salt, ingredients that are thought to shield people from evil”, and reports the colour logic in a wearer's terms: 'According to Turkish belief, blue acts as a shield against evil and even absorbs negativity.' It also carries the argument from rarity — in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, blue eyes are uncommon, and light-eyed people were held able to curse with a look.

The bead is old and the word is not the oldest thing about it. The Turkish boncuk, the blue glass eye bead, is a design of great antiquity; written documentation and surviving beads date from as early as the sixteenth century BCE, and glass beads were made and used from Mesopotamia to Egypt, from Carthage to Greece, from Phoenicia to Persia and through the Roman imperial period.

And it now has a code point. Unicode added U+1F9FF 🧿 NAZAR AMULET in 2018. Inference — that is the moment the word finished its journey: a name for a look, then a bead, then a character available on every phone on earth, sent by people who have never heard the Arabic.

Tradition holds — wearers say a bead that breaks has taken a strong nazar and stored it, and broken in order to protect the person wearing it.