A cocktail ring is a large statement ring set with a single oversized centre stone, most often a coloured one, raised high so that it catches the light and the eye. It is worn for pleasure rather than to mark an engagement or a marriage, traditionally on the right hand, and it is very often a ring a woman chooses for herself.
The Verdant Emerald, sixteen carats, in eighteen-carat gold.
Where the name comes from
The cocktail ring belongs to the 1920s and to Prohibition America. With alcohol banned, the parties moved behind unmarked doors, into speakeasies reached by a password, and the drinks were mixed into cocktails. The women who went there wore rings to match the moment: bold, oversized and impossible to overlook, raised with every glass. A ring on the right hand, bought with her own money, said something about the woman wearing it. It still does.
How it has been worn since
By the 1950s the cocktail ring had become part of dressing for the evening, worn to dinner, to the opera and to the cocktail hour that gave it its name. It returned larger still in the 1980s, and today it is a fixture of fine jewellery. The guidance has hardly changed in a century: one ring, worn with confidence, and the rest of the hand left to frame it.
What makes a cocktail ring
Scale comes first. A cocktail ring is built around a stone of real presence, set high in its mount so that it sits proud of the finger and gathers light from every side. Colour is the tradition, ruby, emerald, sapphire, aquamarine and tanzanite among the classics, and the stone is cut to show that colour at its deepest. The setting is there to hold the stone up to the light and then step aside. In warm gold a green or red stone glows; in platinum a blue or violet one turns cooler and brighter still.
The cocktail rings of The Bardot Collection
The statement pieces of The Bardot Collection are cocktail rings in the truest sense: one stone, sixteen carats, chosen for colour above all. The Empress Ruby in pigeon blood red, The Rosalind in pink champagne sapphire, The Vesper in violet-blue tanzanite, The Capri in aquamarine, The Chartreuse in yellow-green emerald and The Verdant in deep green emerald. Each stone is laboratory-grown, set in hallmarked platinum or eighteen-carat gold, made individually in Britain and independently authenticated by a jeweller qualified with the Gemological Institute of America and the Gemmological Association of Great Britain.
Sixteen carats is also a number worth keeping: a cocktail ring for a sixteenth wedding anniversary holds one carat for every year. Read more about A Carat for Every Year.
Every piece is shown in detail by private video appointment, from wherever you are in the world.
