Lab-grown diamonds and earrings that won’t leave you in a tangle are shaping the way we choose our jewellery It is almost Valentine’s Day, but that is not why I’m thinking about jewellery. Well, it sort of is, but it also really isn’t. Unfashionably, I love Valentine’s Day, but the spirit of Saint Valentine is very much one of card and flowers, to me. When did it get turned into expensive, sexy Christmas? Jewellery and Valentine’s Day go together like – I was going to say Romeo and Juliet, but only the dreamy first date bit. Both jewellery and Valentine’s Day are about love, but jewellery has always been, as Valentine’s Day is now, also about money. In the bronze age, rings were traded as an early form of currency; the ancient Egyptians had wedding rings, a habit adopted by their Greek conquerers. Roman wedding rings were forged from iron, sometimes with a key motif to symbolise a wife’s control over household finances. For women who could neither work nor own property, jewellery given by a husband or a parent was both a love token – and a potential running away fund, to be squirrelled away just in case the love part didn’t work out. So, while it is fashionable to blame modern hypercapitalism for everything, jewellery was about money as well as love long before De Beers invented the diamond engagement ring with its 1947 slogan, “A diamond is forever”. Continue reading...
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