Engagement Rings & Weddings / History
The History of Diamond Engagement Rings
By Marion Fasel, Updated August 20, 2025
It’s a story that’s gone on for over 500 years.
Courtesy of Tiffany & Co.
Where does the history of engagement rings begin? Natural diamond engagement rings have long been an integral part of wedding traditions. Yet, little is known about their origin story. To make matters worse, there are several misconceptions about when and why women began wearing them. Outsized credit has been attributed to the De Beers advertising campaign with the tagline “A Diamond Is Forever.” Many people mistakenly believe the diamond ring ritual was a niche practice until the long-running ads launched in 1947.
The History of Diamond Engagement Rings: A True Romance by Marion Fasel is the first book to tell the story and illustrate the history of engagement rings in relation to how diamond rings became one of, it not the most, enduring jewelry traditions.
Meet the Expert
- Marion Fasel is an esteemed jewelry expert, author, curator, and trend forecaster.
- She is the founder and Editorial Director of The Adventurine online jewelry magazine.
- She is the author of several books, including The History of Diamond Engagement Rings: A True Romance.
Featuring more than 165 images, the book traces the evolution of engagement rings from the 15th century, detailing pivotal moments in the style’s development. The following is an excerpt from the publication.
Who Owned The First Diamond Engagement Ring?
Mary of Burgundy shown wearing her diamond engagement ring in a portrait painted by Niklas Reiser around 1500.
Many books, media outlets, and websites have incorrectly reported that Archduke Maximilian of Austria gave Mary of Burgundy the first diamond engagement ring in 1477.
But it wasn’t the first. Two years earlier, Costanzo Sforza gave Camilla D’Aragona a diamond engagement ring. Camilla’s ring is illustrated in a manuscript housed in the Vatican Library that chronicles her four-day wedding celebration near the Adriatic Sea. During the nuptials, a poem was read that said: “Two wills, two hearts, two passions are bonded in one marriage by a diamond.”
Two wills, two hearts, two passions are bonded in one marriage by a diamond.
The existence of the rings Camilla and Mary received suggests that there were others, and they support George Frederick Kunz’s theory. The “Father of American Gemology” wrote in his book, Rings For The Finger: From The Earliest Known Time to the Present, published in 1917: “The use of a diamond ring for betrothals seems to have been general toward the end of the 15th century, for royal personages at least.”
It’s quite possible that diamond engagement rings were being worn as far back as the mid-15th century. An example of the oldest styles with point cut diamonds can be gleaned in the ring box beside the couple and artisan depicted in the 1449 Petrus Christus Northern Renaissance masterpiece, A Goldsmith in His Shop.
In Renaissance art, diamonds were painted in black because the early shapes didn’t reflect much light or have the gemological qualities of brilliance and fire found in faceted gems. Instead, diamonds were valued for other characteristics such as symmetry, a mirror-like surface, and supreme hardness.
The Tiffany Setting That Changed Everything
The beginning of the modern era of diamond engagement rings can be pinned to an exact time and place. It was 1886 during the Gilded Age in New York City when Tiffany & Co. founder, Charles Lewis Tiffany, conceived a style that would become known as the Tiffany Setting.
To put the period in context, the year the ring launched, the Statue of Liberty opened to the public, and Coca-Cola appeared on grocery shelves for the first time.
The deceptively simple Tiffany Setting raised a round diamond above a gold band with six prongs that allowed light to pass through the gem, heightening its brilliance.
Just a few years after the design launched, Mr. Tiffany offered the ring in a wide range of gem sizes and prices at his firm’s New York City boutique and through mail-order catalogs sent out across America that included a paper ring sizer. The marketing style and accessibility contributed to the success of the Tiffany Setting and established the jeweler’s reputation as the source for engagement rings.
Cultural Tradition
Engagement rings had become a widespread cultural tradition throughout Europe and America by the end of the 19th century. Evidence of this can be seen in the various styles found in jewelers’ inventories as well as their appearance in literature, paintings, etiquette books, and fashion magazines.
From the earliest days of Hollywood at the dawn of the 20th century, diamond engagement rings were frequently used in movies to create dramatic turning points and accelerate the action. The recurring role proves, yet again, that solitaires were a universal symbol easily understood by the large audiences that movies reached.
In real life, silent screen stars started the tradition, which goes on to this day, of showing off a new engagement ring to the press. Gloria Swanson, for example, styled the giant moval diamond she received from the French nobleman Henri, Marquise de la Falaise so it could be clearly seen behind the lace in her iconic Edward Steichen portrait, which was taken for Vanity Fair in 1924.
Norma Shearer flaunted the marquise-shaped diamond engagement ring she received from MGM studio executive Irving Thalberg, both on screen and off. And Joan Crawford made sure the east-west set 2.5-carat emerald-cut diamond ring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. gave her in 1929 was visible in her glamorous publicity stills.
A Diamond Is Forever
A marriage boom began in America after World War II ended. All the weddings motivated De Beers, the company that then controlled the world’s diamond production, to hire the advertising agency N.W. Ayer in 1947 to create a campaign promoting diamonds with an emphasis on engagement rings. Copywriter Frances Gerety was assigned to the account.
After working on it all day and into the night, as Gerety recounted once, “Dog tired, I put my head down and said, ‘Please God, send me a line.’” Then she wrote, “A Diamond Is Forever.”
The overwhelming success of the tagline that was used in campaigns for decades has led people to believe that it marked the beginning of the history of engagement rings or that it started the tradition in modern times. Many assumed that De Beers ads were the reason people wore engagement rings. What the tagline did was increase the popularity of diamond engagement rings.
Another fallacy that has grown up around the campaign is that, in conjunction with the ads, N.W. Ayer “convinced Hollywood actresses to wear diamond rings.” While the agency sent out a newsletter covering celebrity jewelry and made every effort for those real-life moments to receive as much press as possible, there was no “convincing” involved and certainly no payment to the stars. Hollywood actresses had a long history of loving the glamour of diamond jewels long before N.W. Ayer arrived on the scene.
Diamond Engagement Rings Are All About Individuality Now
Today, brides have more options than ever before in the history of engagement rings, and they are selecting styles that reflect their personalities. It is easy to see the variety in the choices celebrities have made.
Jennifer Lawrence, for example, wears an emerald-cut diamond engagement ring designed by Alison Lou, which is understated by Hollywood standards. Whereas Scarlett Johansson sports an avant-garde, approximately 11-carat, light brown pear-shaped diamond set on a curved brown ceramic band by Taffin.
Lady Gaga‘s large oval diamond and Selena Gomez’s marquise exude the type of glamour found in the engagement rings worn by stars during the Golden Age of Hollywood.
