The Story of Jewellery

The 1920s gave jewellery a sharp new language of geometry and speed. The grandest pieces were platinum and diamond — but the look belonged to everyone, and it reached them in silver.

For most of history the most precious jewel on earth wasn’t mined — it was fished. A single pearl could outvalue a diamond, until one man learned to grow them.

Feared everywhere else, the snake became jewellery’s most enduring emblem of eternal love — from the crown of a pharaoh to the finger of a queen.

Your birthstone is older than the calendar it hangs on. It began on a priest’s breastplate, passed through the zodiac, and was fixed into its modern form in a single meeting in 1912.

In an age too polite to speak plainly, the Victorians let flowers do the talking. A single posy could say what a lady never could — remember me, I love you, forgive me.

The diamond engagement ring is younger than the light bulb. Its story runs from a Habsburg archduke to four words written late one night in Philadelphia.

Slip a ring onto the fourth finger and you are following a two-thousand-year-old piece of anatomy — one that is entirely mistaken, and lovely anyway.