If you’ve been planning an original piece of jewellery, don’t let the lockdown get in the way. We are still designing jewellery for customers all over the world, and we’d love to help you make progress with your design.
Here, we share our top tips for finding jewellery inspiration during the lockdown.
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In this piece, it’s all about Tiffany & Co!
If we were to ask you to name a famous fine jewellery house, it’s more than likely that among the Cartiers and Van Cleef & Arpels that the name Tiffany & Co would pop up. With stores and concessions in almost every major city in the world, and a sales plan that seeks to encompass every income, it’s not only one of the world’s best known jewellery brands, but one of the world’s best known brands, full stop.
But when did it all start?
The roots of Tiffany & Co lie in a business founded in 1837 by Charles Lewis Tiffany and John B. Young, initially as a “stationery and fancy goods emporium”, selling mainly stationery items, named “Tiffany, Young and Ellis”. In 1853, the name was changed to Tiffany & Company, when Charles Tiffany took control and established the first steps into luxury items and jewellery.
One of Tiffany & Co’s most famous marketing tools, their mail-order catalogue – now known as the Blue Book – was first issued in 1845, the unmistakeable shade of blue chosen by Charles Tiffany himself. Their focus on luxury and quality was rewarded when, in 1867, Tiffany was the first U.S. firm to win an award for excellence in silverware at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. Their reputation for high end design was given added prestige in 1878, when Tiffany & Co. won the gold medal for jewellery and a grand prize for silverware at the Paris Exposition.
In 1887, Tiffany bought a selection of the French Crown Jewels, when they were put up for sale by the Third French Republic (we can’t help thinking that the jolly old French made a major boo boo here, but hey, c’est la vie!) This move resulted in much publicity and further solidified the Tiffany brand’s association with high-quality diamonds. This purchasing of fabulous European jewels and jewellery had been started in 1848, by Charles Tiffany, who went on a buying expedition to Europe, buying up heirlooms and family pieces from the increasingly impoverished European aristocracy.
The Tiffany engagement ring was designed in 1886, using a unique six-prong device that maximises the gemstone’s sparkle, allowing light to hit the stone on all sides. It’s still in production today and we can’t even begin to guess how many fingers sport this ring. Personally, we’d choose a bespoke design from Christopher Evans any day…!
Made it to the moviesIn 1961, Tiffany & Co made the silver screen, in the eternally fabulous film, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, starring the incomparable Audrey Hepburn. Hepburn played Holly Golightly, an eccentric good time girl in search of a rich, older man. She loves Tiffany, she says, because:
“It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets.”
It was in 1969 when the brand released their now iconic Return to Tiffany keyring, a design that has since inspired one of their bestselling collections globally. In 1974, new designer Elsa Peretti joined Tiffany, and later was responsible for another of Tiffany & Co’s most iconic pieces, the Tiffany heart.
Fine jewelleryTiffany & Co isn’t all silverware and mass production of course. They were responsible for introducing the peachy-pink gemstone morganite in 1910, named for financier JP Morgan by Tiffany’s chief gemmologist, Dr. George F Kunz. Kunz himself has the pink gemstone Kunzite named after him, of course, following its discovery in 1903. In 1968 Tiffany made the fabulous blue gemstone Tanzanite one of the world’s most sought-after gems, and in 1974 they introduced the green gemstone Tsavorite, which they named for the Tsavo National Park in Kenya, where it was discovered.
Over the decades their collections of high jewellery have revealed some of the most beautiful pieces ever designed, with breath-taking use of coloured gems, from sapphires and tanzanite to tourmaline, aquamarine and zoisite.
It’s clear that Tiffany means different things to different people, but whether you’re in the market for a one-of-a-kind piece of couture jewellery, or a Tiffany key-ring to call your own, the arrival of anything in a pale blue box, adorned with a white ribbon, is sure to set your heart beating harder.
Tourmalines are one of the most versatile of gemstones, coming in a wide variety of glorious colours.
Indeed, the tourmaline has one of the widest ranges of colours of any gemstone, occurring in graduating shades of virtually every hue, which has led to their being mistaken for many other gemstones over the centuries. It’s only the development of modern technology and minerology studies that has enable us to see that the tourmaline is a whole other gemstone altogether.
Its very name comes from the Sinhalese word ‘toramalli’, meaning mixed gems, referring to the stones found there and traded by Dutch merchants. Only since the 1800’s have these stones been recognised for what they are and the pleasure they can bring to jewellery designers. In fact, they were a real favourite of Tiffany gemmologist George F Kunz, who sang the praises of the gems mined in Maine and California. Today, most tourmalines come from large deposits found in Brazil, with fabulous red stones being found in Madagascar and Afghanistan.
What’s in a name?Because of the wide variety of shades, it’s become necessary for some of the most sought after to be named in their own right.
Pink, red, purplish red, orange-red and brown-red tourmaline are known as Rubelite.
Dark purple-blue, blue or green-blue tourmalines are called Indicolite.
The stunning Paraíba tourmaline is a rich violet-blue or deep blue tourmaline, named for the location of its main source, Paraíba, in Brazil.
Chrome tourmaline is intense green, 
Watermelon tourmaline is pink in the centre and green around the outside. These dazzlingly different gemstones can be cut on the flat, like a slice through a watermelon, or faceted, with the colour running top to bottom. Both cuts always draw comment.
Savannah tourmalines are, unsurprisingly, bright yellow, while the dramatic Schorl tourmaline is typically black, and not often used in jewellery, though it was used in mourning jewellery in the late 18th century, when that was a thing,
Designer’s favouriteOne of the reasons we love to work with tourmaline is that, apart from the very rarest and most vivid of coloured stones, it offers a great deal more bang for our customers’ buck than the traditional coloured gemstones, the big four: sapphire, emerald, ruby and diamond. Apart from the ruby, all these gems come in a range of hues too, though not so many as the tourmaline does. However, a stunning Rubelite ring won’t hit the bank balance nearly as hard as a ruby ring!
If you’re looking for something beautiful and unusual, and uniquely yours, consider the tourmaline…you will love it forever.
We have talked in the past about some of most extraordinary and rightly famous jewellery designers of times past and present, but this time we want to throw the spotlight on the relatively unknown Neha Dani, who has followed a career in gemmology and jewellery design that has taken her across three continents and today creates some of the most dazzling and original pieces we have ever seen.
Neha Dani was born and raised in South India and as a result of her privileged upbringing was exposed to the greatest art and design of all the ages, visiting museums and art galleries across the world with her family. After finishing school, she defied her family’s expectations and, rather than marry and start a family of her own, enrolled in gemmology classes at the Gemological Institute of America, in Southern California.
After graduating from the GIA, she went on to become a fellow of the Gemmological Association ofGreat Britain, before returning to India to join International Gemological Institute at their new Mumbai laboratory and it was this move that led her to, at last, designing her own, unique pieces with the fine gems and diamonds she is so familiar with.
Neha’s style is fluid, organic and,, while undoubtedly contemporary, is ultimately timeless. She takes her inspiration from nature, from the pure beauty of leaves and plants, from both the land and the sea.
As a creator of couture jewellery, or haute joaillerie, to use the French internationally accepted term, Neha creates each piece using traditional methods.
She first draws her designs on paper, before translating her ideas to an actual-size 3D wax model. By working in wax, she can re-shape and manipulate her design until it takes the form she has dreamed of.
When Neha is satisfied with its design, it is passed to craftsmen to bring it to fabulous, bejewelled life.
Neha’s ‘classic’ collection uses yellow, white and rose gold as the visible precious metal, lending a more traditional feel to her designs.
However, in her contemporary collection, she has developed a signature use of coloured rhodium plating over 18k gold, resulting in breathtakingly sculptural pieces that vibrate with colour and life.
Whichever you prefer, you can’t argue that this relatively new face in haute joaillerie design is one to be welcomed with open arms, as both a provider of inspiration and driver of new frontiers in jewellery design.
You’ve all heard it, or said it, when a friend presents her new diamond engagement ring: ‘how many carats is it?’ and then we breathlessly hang on the answer. But what does it mean? What is carat weight? And why is carat weight important?
Diamond weight is stated in metric measurements called carats. One carat is equal to 200 milligrams, which is 1/5 of a gram or 0.20 gram. There are 142 carats in an ounce. The carat is actually the standard unit of weight for most gemstones, helping standardise the way most gemstones are valued.
So, now we know the technical bits, but how did they come up with this particular way of measuring the weight of a gemstone? Fascinatingly, the modern carat system has its roots in the carob seed, which comes from the locust tree. Because the seeds, which come from a large pod, like a bean pod, are pretty much uniform in size and weight, they were a useful standard for determining the weight of a gem in the very earliest times of gem trading. Early diamond merchants and jewellers used carob seeds as counterweights in hand-held balance scales. We love this! It’s not likely our customers would approve of diamonds from us being sold by carob weight however, so it’s unlikely we’re going to argue for a return to retro diamond weighing.
In the early 20th century carat weight was standardised as 0.20 gram. This gave buyers, sellers and owners a fixed and internationally accepted weight standard for diamonds, against which, of course, a monetary value could be set.
Carat is abbreviated as “ct” and weights are typically given to two decimal places: 1.00 ct, 0.76 ct, 1.57 ct.
Like the pound sterling, a carat is made up of 100 parts, called “points” and abbreviated as “pt.” An easy way to remember this is to think of carats as pounds and points as pennies. Every diamond, before it is allowed to enter the public marketplace, must be given a carat weight, which forms part of its rating, along with the other Cs – colour, cut and clarity. The carat weight of every gemstone is recorded to two decimal places – so 0.87ct, or 3.24ct, or 1.49ct, for example.
Why is carat weight important?The price of a diamond increases as its carat weight increases. Since diamonds of 1.00 ct or larger are rarer, prices jump dramatically for these stones. But, not all diamonds have the same value per carat as other diamonds – the value per carat (or carat point) is set according to the combination of the 4 Cs – cut, clarity and colour, as well as carat.
Carat weight also helps you compare prices between diamonds with different weights but the same colour, clarity and cut grades, allowing you to compare the per carat price for each stone to see where you’re getting the best value. A 0.50ct stone for example, because of the nice round number, and being able to say ‘it’s a half carat’ can cost more than one that is 0.49ct a difference invisible to the naked eye ((as long as the cut, clarity and colour is the same) Strange, but true!
It also allows you to assess two stones the same carat weight, but with perhaps differing clarity or colour, and decide whether size is everything, or overall quality is preferable. A one carat stone of a reduced clarity or slightly darker colour will cost less than a one carat stone with excellent colour and clarity, but still be big and sparkly and again, very difficult to tell the difference if you’re not a trained goldsmith or valuer.
A very personal choiceAll of this makes diamond selection a fascinatingly personal choice, which is why we spend as much time as we need helping our customers choose the stones they want in the jewellery they ask us to make for them. Simply by changing a single stone, while maintaining carat weight, changes to the budget can be made.
This means that by going bespoke, your dream ring is not as far out of your reach as you might think! Hurrah!
If you want to learn more, call in or make an appointment – we love, love, love to talk diamonds! And sapphires. And rubies. And citrines. And tourmalines. And peridot. And…well, you get the picture!
When we think of Marie Antoinette we think of her dedication to hedonism, her doomed flight from Paris in the dead of night, her execution by Guillotine and, of course – “let them eat cake.”
However, as a Queen of France, centre of the fashion universe and renowned for her love of spending money, perhaps we should also think of her jewellery collection. It was surely splendid, yes? Oh yes, it was indeed – as can be seen when you look at surviving portraits painted of her; strings of natural pearls, sapphires, rubies and diamonds in many colours – all these graced her famous (prematurely shortened) neck.
Marie Antoinette, her husband – Louis XVI, King of France – and their children attempted to escape from Paris in June 1791. They were captured 250km away, after they were recognised at their previous carriage stop. Their escape was doomed to failure from the start. Louis kept changing the details and postponing the date. Rather than throw the family into two light carriages and racing away (as they were recommended to do) they chose a single heavy travelling coach and six horses, which was not only a great deal slower, but really rather conspicuous. Additionally, Louis believed that outside of Paris and the revolutionary fervour, he and the royal family were still very popular. He was mistaken.
Louis XVI was beheaded in January 1793 and his wife, Marie Antoinette, the following October. Their son Louis XVII died while imprisoned, aged just 10, and their daughter Marie-Thérèse, known as Madame Royale, was kept in solitary confinement until December 1795. Upon her release, she was sent to Austria.
The royal jewels surviveAnd what of Marie Antoinette’s jewels? Well, their escape plan was far better designed and executed. It was in March 1791 that the royal family first began to prepare for their escape from France (I told you Louis had dithered about!) and part of their plans involved the family jewels. According to the memoirs of one of Marie Antoinette’s ladies in waiting the French queen personally wrapped all of her jewellery in cotton and placed them in a wooden chest. This was then sent to her sister, the Archduchess Marie-Christine, ruler of Brussels. From here they were sent to Vienna, to the Emperor of Austria, Marie Antoinette’s nephew. In 1795 they were passed to Madame Royale. As she had no children of her own, Madame Royale, in her will she split the collection of her mother’s jewels into three parts, leaving one third – ten magnificent pieces – to her niece, Louise of France, Duchess of Parma and grand-daughter of Charles X, King of France, who in turn left them to her son, Robert I, the last ruling Duke of Parma.
The ten pieces left to the Bourbon-Parma family were sent to auction at Sotheby’s in Geneva in November 2018, giving us a unique opportunity to glimpse the very pieces that dressed the person of one of the most famous women in history.
One of the most show-stopper-y of pieces in the collection was Marie-Antoinette’s Pearl and Diamond Bow pendant. A vast natural pearl, in a baroque tear-drop shape, suspended from a diamond set bow, which is in turn suspended from an oval white diamond. In life, Marie-Antoinette wore this pendant suspended from a three strand pearl necklace.
Pearls were one of the queen’s preferred jewels, and in this period were more valuable than diamonds, as they were so rare. This pendant was purchased for approximately £28m at auction, against an estimate of £756,000 – £1.5m. A record price for a pearl at auction, it seems that even Sotheby’s underestimated the pull of a pearl owned by a doomed queen.
Actually, it’s not entirely accurate to call topaz the birthstone for November, as there are in fact two birthstones for this chilly, damp month – topaz and citrine. In which case we ought perhaps to say topaz is a birthstone for November. Both are golden sunny stones of course, but both have different histories and different meanings.
If you want to learn more about the citrine, we wrote about this fabulous golden gemstone once before and you can read it here.
In this post we’re going to talk about the topaz.
Topaz and citrine look remarkably similar, but aren’t related at all. Unlike citrine, topaz is actually available in many colours, from smokey grey to blush pink, although over the millennia pretty much every yellow gemstone was called a topaz, until the progress of science allowed us to understand that different gemstones have different structures and indeed that not all topaz’s are yellow!
In fact, pure topaz is without any colour, but it can become stained by impurities to take on any colour of the rainbow. The colour that is most prized is known as Imperial topaz, which has a rich orange hue with pink or red undertones. It is thought that the name of this shade of topaz originated with the Russian royal family’s insistence on keeping the finest colours of stones mined in their own Ural Mountains exclusively for their own use. Blue topaz is also highly prized but is rare in its natural form, meaning that most blue topaz you will find has been heat treated to achieve the desired colour.
As with all gemstones known from ancient times, this birthstone for November has many powers attributed to it. The ancient Greeks believed that topaz gave them strength. During the late middle ages it was thought to be able to prevent magic spells and dispel anger. The November birthstone was also believed to have curative powers; used to treat weak eyesight. Hmmm, well, I guess the proof of its efficacy would be easy to see…
If you’re seeking fine jewellery showcasing your own birthstone, then you’ve a fabulous choice when it comes to topaz; you’re not restricted to yellow, of course, but then, that’s not really an issue, surely? Not when it’s this gorgeous.
Beyoncé has created for herself quite an extraordinary collection of fabulous jewellery, and when it comes to style, well, she likes it big.
This is not a woman who does subtle, and who can blame her – her talent is towering, her attitude to life is fierce and her success is global.
The scene was set in 2008, when husband JayZ put a ring on it in style, with an 18-carat emerald-cut, flawless diamond ring with a split shank. Once that beauty was in place, only big and beautiful would do. Hubby dearest followed that up with another 18-carat stunner in 2012, when he celebrated the arrival of their first child, Blue Ivy, with an emerald-cut sapphire.
Both rings were made by American jewellery designer Lorraine Schwartz, who also made a 15-carat cushion cut diamond ring for Kanye West and Kim Kardashian and a 6-carat heart shaped solitaire for Taylor Kinney and Lady Gaga.
More is moreBeyoncé’s red carpet style is certainly quite the opposite of less-is-more. In 2015, she wore a collection of Schwartz jewels worth $10m – 100 carats of diamond rings, 50 carats of emerald rings and 80 carats of emerald-and-diamond chandelier earrings – to the Grammys, while in 2017 she upped the ante with a $12 million Schwartz necklace.
It may be all about the bling for Beyoncé, but she doesn’t restrict herself to haute joaillerie; she also has a magnificent collection of statement and costume jewellery – though of the finest quality from high end designers. No market stall buys for our Bey.
Bought it myselfIf you consider jewellery to be the ultimate expression of status and wealth, then Beyoncé is nailing that on the head. However, you might also argue that this is a woman who has worked incredibly hard, lived her life in the harsh, unforgiving, ever-speculative public eye and achieved massive success through her own brains and business skills, as well as her towering talent. In which case, she’s making a slightly different statement: I worked for it, I earned it, I bought it myself. And why the hell not?
We’ve seen an increasing number of women coming to us and buying their own bespoke pieces, celebrating their own power and place in the world. Sometimes known as the ‘right hand ring’, this is a piece chosen by a woman to suit herself, paid for by herself. This allows for complete control over design and budget…and don’t it feel good?
Just ask Beyoncé.
The award for the most popular engagement ring style for 2018 goes to….drum roll please…the ART DECO inspired ring!
According to Pinterest (and let’s face it, they’d know) the modern bride-to-be is turning away from the traditional, single stone diamond ring and looking for something a little more unusual.
Pinterest is, of course, the most popular wedding planning search engine. Forget Google, if you want to see what’s new in the world of weddings, or soak up some #weddinginspo for your own, then Pinterest is the place to start.
Searches on Pinterest for art deco engagement rings went up by an enormous 173%, while searches for rings with an oval stone went up by 125%, year on year.
Finally, searches for rings with coloured stones saw an impressive lift too, a trend we have seen ourselves indeed. Coloured gems of course needn’t mean fancy coloured diamonds, something we covered in our post about choosing a non-traditional engagement ring.
Chris is rather a fan of the Art Deco style and has already created many beautiful rings, both engagement rings and cocktail rings, in this style. They work beautifully with coloured gemstones and the emerald cut stones really stand out, making your ring absolutely one on its own.
If you want to know more about Art Deco style engagement rings, coloured gemstones or indeed the whole bespoke engagement ring process, just give us a call – we always love to talk jewellery!
July is well served by birthstones. As well as the ruby, the most well-known birthstone for July, there is Carnelian. This is a semi-precious gemstone that comes in an array of dazzling orange reds, sometimes striped with white. Very pretty!
Carnelian is not a stone that can be sharply faceted, like a diamond or a ruby, as its crystalline structure is very fine – it is in fact a micro-crystalline form of quartz, with the white translucent stone given colour by iron impurities within it. This often results in bands of colour across a pale stone, but fully red stones do occur and make fabulous pieces when polished or carved.
This is a very hard gemstone, meaning that it can be quite finely carved – making it a popular choice for signet rings with crests and similar adornments right back to Roman times. The carved design, if a crest, would often be done as a mirror image, to allow the ring to be used as an impression on a wax seal, on legal documents and letters, to prove the sender’s identity. These were particularly popular in the late 18th and early 19th century, a reflection of the resurgence of the neo-classical design style in architecture, interiors and jewellery; you can find examples of these elegant rings today, at specialist antique jewellers around the world. It was well known and loved in Ancient Egypt too, with its warm red tones often set against blue lapis and black onyx in collars and necklaces for royalty and the aristocracy.
In the Middle Ages carnelian was believed to have healing properties and even today it is known as the Singer’s Stone, due to its associations with confidence and the power of true expression, so enhancing creativity and passion. In fact, the multi-award winning singer Adele, who has cited her belief in the power of crystals, wears a rather beautiful carnelian bracelet, made by couture fine jewellers Van Cleef & Arpels.
This warm and pretty stone clearly translates into quite stunning jewellery, carved or polished to a warm glow and sets beautifully into yellow or white gold and silver. Used by fine jewellers and fashion jewellers alike, the only limit is the designer’s imagination, which we know will never be an issue for Christopher Evans – fine, fine jeweller!
To date we have never actually been asked to create something using carnelian, which is a shame, but perhaps by drawing your attention to this pretty, perfectly priced to deliver serious pow for your pound, glowing red gemstone.
Just think…drop earrings in amber-orange polished carnelian in a surround of diamonds; delicately striped carnelian set in a rose gold tennis bracelet; a tangerine square of glowing carnelian in a yellow gold brushed over setting, with orange sapphires to each side…oh, you could get quite carried away you lucky, lucky July-born babies!