Q&A: Marion Fasel on the History of Diamond Engagement Rings

I’ve been eager to interview Marion Fasel about her new book, “The History of Diamond Engagement Rings” ever since I heard she was writing it.

Last week, I finally got the chance.

Marion and I connected via phone and talked for more than an hour about what influences diamond engagement ring trends, how writing jewelry books has changed over the years, and which styles have endured the test of time.   

The conversation segued into celebrities at points, with Marion explaining Jennifer Lopez’s impact on the popularity of pink diamonds and sharing her prediction for the shape of Taylor Swift’s engagement ring. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Michelle Graff: One of the main points of the book, to me, seems to be to dispel the myth that De Beers “invented” the diamond engagement ring. As a jewelry historian, what have you thought over the years when you read articles or saw segments on TV shows or in movies that perpetrated this idea? Did you always kind of roll your eyes?

Marion Fasel: To be honest, I was not aware before I started working on the book how ubiquitous that idea was.

Normally, when I start a project that’s a jewelry history project, I have my go-to people who know a lot about jewelry history and I’ll just bat around the idea.

And so, I said to several people when I started, “What do you know about the history of diamond engagement rings?” I began to stop asking the question because so many people said to me, “That’s a De Beers thing, right?”

I said, no, it’s not. That was really quite a surprise to me because I think we all know that engagement rings existed before that.

Historically speaking, I certainly was aware of it with women in Hollywood pre-dating 1947 wearing diamond engagement rings.   

Another misconception is people think before 1947, it was really only royalty who wore diamond engagement rings. The women in my family had engagement rings they received during the Great Depression, and they were not royalty or elites; they were just women.

So, yeah, I was pretty stunned that people hadn’t thought through the idea.

Another goal of the book is I really wanted to give diamond engagement rings the history treatment as I did for the history of animal jewelry for the “Beautiful Creatures” exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, or like the other book I did more recently on the history of Bulgari in America over the last 50 years. 

It just seemed to me nobody had done that before with engagement rings and I was surprised by that.

MG: It is surprising. Diamond engagement rings are such a cornerstone of the industry, and we dive into various other segments of the antique jewelry market all the time, Lover’s Eye jewelry, Victorian mourning jewelry. It’s interesting that nobody’s done engagement rings before.

MF: You’ve really hit on something that I’ve begun to preach about, which is, we’re in such an era of symbolic jewelry and jewelry with meaningful motifs, but I don’t think there is a jewel that has a more meaningful message or powerful symbolism than a diamond engagement ring.

A woman holds up a diamond ring on the third finger of her left hand and instantly, everyone’s electrified by what that means.

MG: It’s like what we saw with Zendaya on the red carpet at the Golden Globes last month. That was the biggest jewelry story of the night.

MF: She didn’t have to say a word; she said it all with a ring on her finger. It’s a symbol. It’s powerful and it’s exciting to see a diamond engagement ring on somebody’s hand.

It’s a sign of joy and I think it’s always been celebrated as a joyful event when people decide to merge their lives.

It’s a happy thing and in this day and age, we are searching for joy and optimism.

MG: In the introduction to the book, you write that some styles go in and out of fashion while “others have been around so long, they seem eternal.” Which styles stand out to you as being eternal?

MF: The emerald cut with tapered baguettes and the solitaire round brilliant on a band with no side stones. Those stand out in my mind for sure. Those are the ones that I come across repeatedly.

MG: What in your opinion is the top engagement ring trend right now?

MF: Trends change so much faster than they used to.

In the distant past when I was in print, there used to be a segment of the jewelry world that was designers who made engagement rings and then there was a group of designers who did designer jewelry.

Now those worlds have really merged, and the engagement ring world is so much better for it. I think things move faster because there’s a lot of design talent really focused on this small medium.

[As for what] the popular [engagement ring] trend is right now, I end the book with ovals, and I think that ovals have certainly been kind of ubiquitous.

It’s literally the classic with a twist, you know?

My theory is that Taylor [Swift] will get an oval. I don’t see her doing an emerald or an [unusual] fancy shape like her friend Selena Gomez with her marquise. 

MG: What do you think influences engagement ring trends the most, the rings celebrities receive? 

Here, I’m thinking specifically about the potential influence of Selena and her marquise-cut diamond, a shape that was completely out of style when I started at National Jeweler in 2007.

MF: I think so because the most high-profile engagements of modern times are celebrity engagements.

I noticed a stylist I follow on Instagram, @stylememaeve, she got engaged and she got a north-south set marquise. And I was like, whoa, that’s interesting, it felt new to me. This is pre-dating Selena, but not by much, maybe a year.  And then I did notice a lot of marquises being set akimbo.

Things kind of have to percolate in the market for people, generally speaking, to be interested in them.

Marquises were out there and then Selena locked it in. Now I expect we’ll see more marquises.

Celebrities kind of bring it to the fore and they crystallize things that are happening.

MG: You also write in the book that certain engagement rings “changed the course of design.” Can you give us a few examples?

MF: The Tiffany setting, that would be the setting I hold up as the beginning of modern engagement rings. Just presenting the diamond itself, that changed the course of history and was a clear and direct statement.

I also keep going back to Grace Kelly with her emerald-cut diamond engagement ring with tapered baguettes.

Those two are really the touchstones for sure.

I think more recently—people might really furrow their brows at this concept but I defy you to say I’m wrong—Emily Ratajkowski’s engagement ring with the princess and the pear shapes that are akimbo, that combination and the fact that she put that stone at the slight angle single-handedly has created a genre unto itself.

If you comb the engagement ring market, you will see it again and again and again, and she did it first.

Iman, when she got engaged to David Bowie in the early ‘90s, she got a yellow diamond and I think that was kind of the beginning of color coming in.

And then, of course, Jennifer Lopez with the first ring from Ben Affleck in 2002, the pink diamond. That didn’t just change the engagement ring world; it changed the colored diamond world.

MG: I want to go back to the book for these last couple questions. Can you talk a little bit about the process of researching this book? How long did it take and where did you go to get your information?

MF: Publishing is a tough business nowadays, and you have to turn around things really quickly. My first book, “Hollywood Jewels,” I think we did it over a period of four years. Now you have no time to do these books at all. 

It was just a very intense experience, and I knew it was going to be tough so I started early on it. 

It took me more than twice as long as any of the books I’ve done recently. And it was kind of funny because it’s a topic that people are very dismissive of because they think it’s simple or the story’s been told.

I spent a lot of time digitally doing research [through] museums around the world, which was very much a new experience for me. 

One example, I had a reference that there was this wedding, this Sforza wedding, which predates Mary of Burgundy (who is widely believed to have received the first engagement ring) by three years. 

And I knew that there was an illustrated book that went along with this, but the book is at the Vatican so you can’t Google this. 

You can go through the Vatican library digitally, you can do everything digitally, which is the blessing. 

But also, you might as well be at the Vatican in the library because, you think microfiche is difficult,  try finding an illustration in the Vatican library in a certain book with a certain volume, with a certain chapter. Oh my God.

MG: When I was looking at the book, it got me to thinking about how long people have been getting engaged with diamonds, all the way back to the 1400s. And it made me wonder, why the diamond to begin with?

MF: It’s a question I ask myself all the time. I think the answer is most likely the inherent qualities of the diamond, which is that it is strong, it’s durable as a piece of jewelry to wear, and it’s valuable. I think all those things added to it.

MG: If you had to pick one engagement ring out of this book for yourself, which one would it be?

MF: Some people ask me, “What’s your favorite ring on the cover?” And I say, “I picked all of them. They’re all me.” I have many sides to my character, I have many facets to my personality, so that’s really true. 

But today, this day, right now, if I have to decide, I’m going with the [Jean] Prounis ring on the cover, an east-west set cushion. 

I like the combination. It’s kind of something old and something new because her setting is really based on ancient gold techniques. And I love the east-west setting, I love a cushion. 

The cushion is to the emerald cut what the oval is to the round.