The Lure of the Engagement Ring

by Kelly Bare

“Right now, people are really looking back to antique and vintage pieces, looking to them for comfort,” O’Connor says. “These are pieces we all remember from when we were younger: ‘This looks like my mom’s ring, my grandmother’s pin.’ Celebrities and stylists want authentic vintage pieces for award shows, and a lot of designers are reflecting that trend.”

The other big influence, he says, is a counter-trend toward classic, straightforward lines. “Everyone’s so overloaded because of everything we have going on in the world. We’re looking forward with the view that ‘I want everything in my life to be as simple as possible’.” (Though not, of course, so simple that we’d skip the sparkler altogether.)

As always, Hollywood helps set the trends. Unprompted, O’Connor rattles off a bevy of celebrity-ring details: “Jessica Simpson-pear-shaped with two brilliants, very classic. Anna Nicole Smith-marquise with tapered baguettes. Melania Knauss, Donald Trump’s intended [now wife]-emerald shape with tapered baguettes. Jennifer Aniston had a much more romantic, frilly kind of style. Sarah Michelle Gellar, she has a princess cut.” And he notes that J. Lo’s big pink ring from (then fiancé) Ben Affleck ushered in a colored-diamond trend that has outlived their relationship.

Some would argue that the pop-culture icons we worship—and the romantic roles we love to watch them play on-screen—figure more prominently in our collective lust for engagement rings than setting the standard for color or cut.

Jaclyn Geller, now an English professor at Central Connecticut State University, posed as a bride-to-be to research her 2001 book, Here Comes the Bride, “a feminist critique of the blockbuster wedding.”

For her, the engagement ring is the central prop in the performance that modern weddings have become; an object with “talismanic” power. “A woman has this engagement ring jammed on her finger, and it’s supposed to be this thing that represents the narrative apex of her life,” Geller writes. “The man kneels before her, she’s supposed to emote so violently that she loses the power of speech. Now, this is a very public, exhibitionist thing-something that takes place at a restaurant or park. Once she says ‘Yes,’ everyone is supposed to cheer. There’s no parallel scene in the wedding iconography where a woman offers a man a piece of jewelry and he loses consciousness.”

Vicki Howard puts it a bit less theatrically. “For a woman, getting engaged is a significant time in her life,” she says. “Men have not needed that symbol to have power in society. Men enjoy being married, too, but they have other things.”

Which is not to say that men can’t get really emotional about their rings.