A short history of the diamond engagement ring

The earliest firm evidence is Roman, although the custom may have started even earlier, with the ancient Egyptians. Pliny the Elder, in his account of the origin of gold rings, says an iron ring with no stone in it was sent as a present to a woman when she was betrothed. Britannica reads the Roman ring as a legal sign of an agreement to marry, a way of showing a woman was spoken for, rather than a romantic gesture. Women from wealthier families might receive a gold ring to wear in public, and later Roman rings were sometimes engraved on the inside with words of affection.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a gold finger ring dated to the third century CE that weighs about 14 g, and Britannica describes it as a Roman betrothal or wedding band. So the ring is old, but the idea that it should carry a gemstone came much later.

In the 12th century the Roman Catholic Church made marriage a sacrament and brought the placing of a ring into the ceremony. Some historians think the engagement ring and the wedding band began to separate then: one as the promise to marry, the other as part of the rite. Around the same time, Jewish weddings also used a ring. Some examples have a miniature gabled roof on the bezel, possibly standing for the Temple of Jerusalem, and such a ring probably belonged to the family or community rather than to the bride.

By the 15th century there were many types. A gimmel ring is made of two or three interlocking hoops that can be pulled apart. A posy ring carries a short inscription inside the band, such as the French Prenes en gre (“accept this willingly”) on an English ring dated about 1500 to 1650 in the British Museum.

It is the one most often cited. Many sources name 1477 as the year of the first recorded diamond engagement ring, when Maximilian, then archduke of Austria and later Holy Roman emperor, commissioned a ring with small diamonds forming an M for his betrothal to Mary, duchess of Burgundy.

The jewellery historian Marion Fasel argues that this milestone has been overblown, because giving a diamond ring to a bride-to-be was already a tradition among the aristocracy. The safest reading is that 1477 is the first well-documented diamond betrothal ring, not necessarily the first. Cutting changed a great deal after it. The old mine cut was a hand-shaped style popular through the 18th and 19th centuries, and the old European cut, which emerged around the 1700s, was the forerunner of today's round brilliant.

Not always like a diamond solitaire. Snakes were a fashionable jewellery motif in the 1840s, and Prince Albert gave Queen Victoria an emerald ring in the shape of a serpent for their engagement.

Two changes matter for what came next, and the first is about supply. Britannica says diamonds found in South Africa in 1867 put the stone within reach of more people, while the Industrial Revolution had already enlarged the middle class. The second is design: the Tiffany-style setting, introduced in 1886, raised the diamond above the band so that it could reflect light from all angles. It is the kind of raised design now associated with the prong setting and the solitaire.

Not every style followed that path. Earlier, in 1796, Napoleon gave Joséphine a toi et moi ring with a pear-shaped diamond and a pear-shaped sapphire. Two-stone rings have stayed in use since.

Several factors came together: the wealth of the Industrial Revolution, the South African finds, and advertising. In Sotheby's assessment, De Beers' 1947 campaign, built on the slogan “A diamond is forever”, took the diamond engagement ring to a new level because the line spoke both to the stone's durability and to a lifelong promise. The slogan was written that year by Frances Gerety, a young copywriter at the agency N W Ayer.

A round brilliant solitaire may feel traditional today, but as a custom shared across social classes it is recent compared with betrothal rings themselves. Another popular belief, that a ring should cost a set share of a salary, has a story of its own in where the three months' salary rule came from.

The table puts the main steps in order, with the source for each. Read it as a sketch rather than a straight line: many customs overlapped, differed between regions and communities, and left patchy records, so a single date marks a well-documented example, not the moment a custom began everywhere. The 1477 date carries the caveat given earlier in this article: it is the best-documented diamond ring, not necessarily the first.

Men's rings have a separate history. A push in the 1920s by US jewellery makers and retailers to sell men's engagement rings was a flop, but American men embraced wedding bands during the Second World War, and by the late 1940s about 80 per cent of weddings between a man and a woman included an exchange of bands. Engagement customs also differ by place: in Chile and Brazil, each partner wears a ring on the right hand during the engagement and moves it to the left hand at the wedding. Men's engagement rings have become increasingly popular, and the men's wedding bands guide covers the bands side.

The shapes have moved too. GIA credits the diamond cutter Lazare Kaplan with developing the modern oval brilliant in 1957, and, citing The Knot's 2023 Real Wedding Study, reports that ovals were 23 per cent of the engagement rings bought that year. That is one survey, not a count of the whole market. Stone choice has widened to natural diamonds, lab-grown diamonds and moissanite, and some buyers now have the ring designed from scratch. If you want to do that, the custom engagement ring service and the design studio start from your own idea, and the showrooms page lists where to talk it through in person.