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Engagement Rings 

There are two often quoted early instances of engagements and the giving and receiving
of a ring. If you watched the recent series of ‘The Borgia’ on TV you may remember their arch rivals, the Sforza family. Constanzo Sforza gave his bride Camilla d’Aragona a wedding day gift of a diamond set ring and a love poem in 1475. A couple of years later in 1477, Maximillian, Archduke of Austria, gave Mary of Burgundy a gold band set with slivers of diamonds in the shape of an ‘M’.

The giving of a token goes much further back and has nothing to do with love but an awful lot to do with ownership and binding contracts between couples and their families. History tells us cavemen bound their girlfriend’s limbs and waist in plaited grasses to bring her spirit
under control, and Pliny wrote of women wearing a gold ring for Sunday best and an iron one for every day use as a symbol of her husband’s legal ownership of her. In Asia, the men became more canny giving their wives puzzle rings. If a woman took it off it was considered unlikely she could piece it back together again. Nice! The Puritans, bless them, gave thimbles as being much more practical.

On the more romantic side, as long ago as 3000 BC, we know from burials that a precious metal
ring was worn on the third finger of the left hand as it was believed this finger was  connected to the heart by the Vena Amoris. The Victorians became positively schmaltzy by comparison with rings that were full of symbolism. Taking the first letter of each stone set in the ring would spell a word. Diamond, Emerald, Amethyst, Ruby spelt ’dear’. A central stone surrounded by smaller stones represented a forget-me-not flower. On the other side, a man in Canada recently became engaged to his girlfriend of three weeks and bought her an engagement worth many thousands of dollars.

They split up and she kept the ring, claiming it was a gift. He is suing her for the value of the ring saying it was a symbol of a contract between them; a contract she had broken. The courts have now to decide between a contract and a gift!

If, after reading the above you still want that ring, current trends are that platinum, white gold and palladium are more popular than yellow golds. The look is now a little more bling than a simple solitaire set on a band. Accent stones in shoulders and fancy settings are more on trend. Diamonds remain the most popular, but as the demand for statement pieces increases, so does the use of coloured stones. Wedding sets are very much in demand with the wedding band fitting its form perfectly to the engagement ring shape. Finally, a combined wedding and engagement ring is being sought after, especially amongst bespoke customers.

StrawberryWood have hundreds of designs in their J t’Adore range, and each ring can be set with any stone in a variety of sizes, giving a totally unique engagement ring and a perfectly matched wedding ring. And if you want something totally unique, a 60ct, internally flawless vivid pink diamond has just sold for £52 million, the highest price ever set for a stone at auction.

A. StrawberryWood’s Alaia ring, a wedding and engagement ring in one piece of jewellery.
B. StrawberryWood’s Ariadne ring from the Conveniere collection.

StrawberryWood

0800 917 8684
P.O. Box 7491, Kettering, N16 6HU
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www.strawberrywood.co.uk