Editor’s Note
**Editor’s Note:** This piece explores the cultural and symbolic impact of Georgina Rodríguez’s engagement ring, blending celestial and sports metaphors to capture its viral significance.
An asteroid landed on her ring finger. A memorable goal in the ranking of the most beautiful engagement rings ever. Sidereal hyperboles and football metaphors are not enough to perfectly summarize the impact of Georgina Rodriguez’s engagement ring on the millions of followers of Cristiano Ronaldo’s girlfriend, and consequently on the world. On an August afternoon, the VIP social media announcement revealed the marriage proposal of the Portuguese footballer, playing in the Arab league, to the Argentine model:
The seal on a nine-year relationship is an oval cut diamond, estimated between 17 and 25 carats and with a value hypothesized at around 2 million dollars for the stone alone, flanked by two smaller diamonds of the same cut. Not a solitaire, but a trilogy of diamonds that makes it resemble a heavy cocktail ring more than a proposal ring. Yet, it follows and enhances the trend of oval-cut center stones, among the favorites for celebrity engagement rings in recent years, after the peaceful coexistence of cushion, square, and round cuts. But in the history of the most beautiful engagement rings ever, with carats raining down and innovative shapes, there have also been particular cuts, extremely rare stones, and family heirlooms to be passed down with care.
Queen Elizabeth II’s engagement ring was the epitome of the style pillars of the last great queen: elegance, sobriety, family, power. A 3-carat solitaire accompanied by ten smaller diamonds set on a platinum band, which Prince Philip personally designed together with London jeweler Philip Antrobus. The stones came from a tiara belonging to his mother, the ill-fated Princess Alice of Battenberg, who had given the jewel to her son in view of the marriage proposal. With the leftover diamonds from the tiara, Philip also had a charming bracelet made, which became a wedding gift for his wife (and was later lent to Kate Middleton). After the queen’s death, buried with her wedding band at her express request, nothing more was known about the engagement ring: as a private jewel, it may have been inherited by one of her four children, and in the future passed down to one of her numerous great-grandchildren.
How did it happen that the American actress who became a princess ended up with two engagement rings? A story worthy of a film, for a film. The first ring, paradoxically less known, was revealed in Philadelphia during the press conference announcing Grace’s marriage to the Prince of Monaco in 1956: designed by Cartier, it was an eternity ring of rubies and diamonds, belonging to the Grimaldi family, in the colors of the Principality’s flag. It was soon overshadowed by the monumental and highly refined 10.48-carat emerald-cut diamond surrounded by two splendid baguette diamonds on the sides, also by Cartier, which ended up on Grace’s finger for cinematic reasons. That year, the future princess was closing her contract with Hollywood by filming High Society, and legend has it that Rainier shook his head at the idea that the character played by Grace Kelly would sport a fake diamond. The prince therefore decided to buy a ring worthy of the lineage, both on and off the set, to give substance to the fiction. A second engagement ring, in essence. But the Prince and Princess of Monaco could not have predicted the cultural impact of a jewel as classic as it was sublime, which became the epitome of Grace herself and of the most beautiful engagement rings ever. Clean, eternal, stunning, copied (even in scale) by anyone seeking beauty and purity, it is considered the most expensive celebrity engagement ring of all time: in 1956 it was worth 4.06 million dollars, today almost 39 million.
The queen (of style) of American royalty par excellence, Jacqueline Bouvier, known to all as Jackie, also made a difference with her engagement rings, setting unique trends like her choices. For her marriage to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jackie received a vintage art deco “toi et moi” ring from Van Cleef & Arpels, which with the stones close together symbolizes the bond between two people. Showy enough to underline the uniqueness of the moment and the relationship, it combined an almost 3-carat emerald-cut diamond with a wonderful emerald of similar size. The ring was modified ten years after the proposal, adding leaves that enveloped the original stones. Quite different in style was Jackie’s engagement ring for her marriage to Aristotle Onassis: a “simple” marquise-cut diamond, on paper. But it was the phenomenal “Lesotho III,” a 40-42 carat diamond cut by Harry Winston from the gigantic 601-carat rough found in Lesotho in 1967, one of the most astonishing stones in the history of jewelry. Jackie wore it only twice in public; it was soon locked away in a vault in New York. In 1996, Jackie’s engagement ring from Onassis was auctioned by Sotheby’s and sold for more than 2.5 million dollars.