Designers give divorce jewellery a happy ever after

Lydia Hart marked her 30th birthday by commissioning a bespoke ring incorporating diamonds from the platinum engagement and wedding rings that had been sitting in a box under her bed.

“My journey since my divorce was very much one of healing and having therapy and reclaiming my own sense of self after that turbulent time,” explains the therapist, who lives in Devon, south-west England. “And so it felt amazing to celebrate the journey that I’d been on in a symbolic way: transforming what had an attachment to my previous marriage into something new — in the same way that I felt like I’d transformed as a person.”

The resulting yellow gold cocktail ring also features pink rubies — Hart’s birthstone — and pink and blue tourmalines. She calls it an “empowerment ring”, a phrase that the London-based goldsmith Susannah King, who made the piece in 2022, has adopted for similar remodels.

Hart is not alone in seeking to reflect a fresh start after divorce in jewellery. London-based Lylie Jewellery saw a spike in inquiries after the American model and actor Emily Ratajkowski revealed her headline-making “divorce rings” on Instagram in March.

Ratajkowski worked with Alison Chemla, founder and creative director of New York-based Alison Lou — which is seeking to trademark the term “divorce ring” — to turn an original two-stone engagement ring that the jeweller had initially made into two new pieces following the end of her marriage. These new pieces are a pinky ring with a pear-shaped diamond and another ring incorporating a princess-cut diamond.

Chemla was “shocked” by the reaction. “It was a lot of attention and I was very excited about it,” she says. “It’s a beautiful thing to be able to use these stones . . . to make something that you want to wear, and change the history [of] your ring.”

Lylie received about double the number of requests for new post-divorce rings from UK customers in the four-month period after Ratajkowski’s announcement on social media, compared with the same period the previous year, according to Eliza Walter, the brand’s founder.

She says “jewellery can be so autobiographical” and people are creating a piece to celebrate a “new chapter in their life”. Lylie offers a bespoke service but also has a remodelling design library that includes example rings, such as the popular Zizila Etruscan and Dodola styles, which can accommodate a client’s existing stones.

King says there is an emphasis among her clients — most of whom are based in the US — on “making the [new] ring look statement and powerful”. She says they “find great solace in completely changing something”.

“You’re no longer held back by your previous situation,” she points out. “So I think there’s a lot to it, psychologically, that makes people want to go for something a lot bigger and bolder, and visually more impressive.”

This includes introducing colour — something for which King is known. Her customers often request tsavorite, garnet and sapphire, and she has recently put LuAG — lutetium aluminium garnet, a lab-created crystal used in laser technology — into a few rings. “It’s like a high-vis jacket,” says King. “It’s really, really bright. So, when we’re talking about a complete revamp, it’s the ultimate stone for it.”

Consumers are not only moving on from divorce with rings, however. “Maybe, sometimes, it’s removing the link to it ever having been a ring that helps have that separation between what it was and what it’s becoming by doing a pendant,” explains goldsmith Jessie Thomas.

Trang Do, founder and creative director of Kimjoux, recently designed an “unconventional” pendant for a client seeking “a powerful symbol of a new beginning”. She reimagined the Toi et Moi style — where two stones nestle side by side, typically to represent a love story — into a “Moi et Moi design”. The piece reused platinum from the client’s engagement and wedding rings as mounts for the emerald-cut engagement diamond and a new pear-shape diamond.

Lylie can cast a client’s own metal separately if they want to reuse it, something Walter says is “very popular” for divorce jewellery.

However, London-based Thomas — who had the “slightly awkward” experience of turning the engagement ring her goldsmith father David Thomas had made for her mother into a new cocktail ring — finds her divorced customers do not regard the metal as sentimental.

She expects the trend for divorce jewellery to grow. “Why the Emily Ratajkowski thing is good is that there is this move away from the stigma of, or the taboo around, divorce, and [towards] people feeling quite free about it and not ashamed in any way,” she says.

Within months of collecting her “empowerment ring”, Hart met her now husband. “We quite quickly got married and got pregnant,” she says. “And so it feels almost like the process of making that ring was a real letting go of the past and representing an openness to the future, and that then really came through in my life as well.”

Two millennia of ring design go on show

The antique jewellery specialist SJ Phillips is showing 121 rings spanning two millennia of design, from Ancient Greece to the 18th century, in London next month.

A selling exhibition of the Jonest collection, assembled over a period of more than 40 years, is being held at the company’s Mayfair showroom from October 7 until 11 to coincide with the Frieze London art fair.

Nicolas Norton, great-grandson of the 155-year-old family business’s founder, says the rings would have adorned “some of the most powerful and wealthiest men and women of their time”.

“With many of these rings having their equivalents in museums, this collection not only traces 2,000 years of ring-making at its highest, but also provides a comprehensive overview of the history of Europe, its belief systems and symbols of power,” says Norton, who is overseeing the sale. He finds it fascinating that such small pieces “can encapsulate both the Zeitgeist and style of an era with the emotions of human life”.

The collection, amassed by a private individual and then his son, who wishes to remain anonymous, includes rings originally given in recognition of love or friendship, signet rings, memento mori, devotional rings, those with inscriptions, decorative examples and engraved gems.

One highlight is a gold signet ring, dating from the late 14th or early 15th century, that features the badge of Richard II. It shows a chained hart with its legs folded beneath its body. “This would most likely have been worn by a representative of the [royal] household,” says Sonia Butler, stock keeper at SJ Phillips, who co-wrote the catalogue for the exhibition, Marvels in Miniature: The Jonest Collection of Rings.

A 17th-century gold swivel locket and seal ring suggests another royal connection. It features below a coronet an enamelled red heart, pierced by two arrows, between the initials “C” and “H” Butler thinks it may have been commissioned to mark the marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria of France in 1625 by “fervent supporter” Sir Richard Manley, whose family emblem — a hand (“main” in French) — is on the back alongside the letters “LEY”.

Norton thinks the collection’s rings, priced at £4,000-£130,000, differ from those worn now because stones have “taken preference over craftsmanship” in modern designs. “Today, a ring is almost like wearing a banknote on your finger, a big diamond ring,” he says. “A diamond is a commodity. These [rings in the collection] are works of art.”