How Taylor Swift’s Engagement Ring Is Changing the Diamond Game
SOURCE:New Yorker|BY:Emilia Petrarca
For decades, couples were told to value a certain kind of rarity. The jewelry designer Kindred Lubeck, with the help of her most famous client, is popularizing the unique qualities of old-mine-cut stones.
For decades, couples were told to value a certain kind of rarity. The jewelry designer Kindred Lubeck, with the help of her most famous client, is popularizing the unique qualities of old-mine-cut stones.
January 2, 2026
Illustration by Sean Dong
Last fall, the jewelry designer Kindred Lubeck took an elevator up six floors to a high-end showroom in New York’s diamond district. She was buzzed inside a fluorescent-lit vestibule, then waited; the front door had to lock securely behind her before a second could open. On the other side, a man in a gray suit named Chirag Mehta greeted her.
Mehta is the president of Sim Gems USA, a diamond dealer that sources investment-worthy stones for discerning billionaires; his customers include Nita Ambani, the wife of the richest man in Asia. Mehta had only recently learned of Lubeck’s work. In August, she was revealed as the designer of Taylor Swift’s engagement ring—an old-mine brilliant cut set in a yellow-gold band that Lubeck engraved by hand. (Good luck zooming in on the photos.) By October, Lubeck had been tapped by Sotheby’s for a closed-bid online auction of three engraved rings; in December, she auctioned two more, including one five-carat, old-mine-cut stone with an obvious resemblance to Swift’s.
Lubeck, who has aquamarine eyes and long, wavy hair, cuts an ethereal figure, like an elven noble. Her father is a goldsmith, and she spent much of the pandemic in her home town, a coastal community in Florida called Neptune Beach, shadowing him at his shop. She became obsessed with metalsmithing, and started pursuing it full time, honing an antique-inspired aesthetic that quickly gained traction on social media. By the time she moved to New York, in 2024, she had started her own business, Artifex Fine, and she had a loyal following in the indie jewelry world.
Swift showed one of Lubeck’s Instagram videos to her fiancé, Travis Kelce, a year and a half before their engagement. “When I saw the ring, I was, like, ‘I know who made that, I know who made that!’ ” Swift said in a radio interview. For Lubeck, it was an enormous break; now she has the trust of dealers such as Mehta, who are often willing to loan stones to designers for speculative projects. On Lubeck’s visit, Mehta opened a safe the size of a refrigerator and plucked out a fifty-carat-plus natural diamond—“Bezos-level,” he said—and set it on a gray fabric tray for her to examine. All Mehta asked was that Lubeck take a photo with him for social media.
In the past, enormous gems were typically used in cocktail rings, for special occasions. Engagement rings were meant for everyday wear. But many of today’s celebrities prefer to blur the distinction: Lauren Sánchez Bezos’s diamond was rumored to weigh in at around thirty carats; the stone that Cristiano Ronaldo gave to his girlfriend, Georgina Rodríguez, whom he met at a Gucci store in 2017, has been estimated to be thirty-five carats. Swift’s stone is large—industry experts have estimated anywhere from seven to ten carats, or about the size of a rounded-oval press-on nail. Yet its style diverges significantly from the icy, minimalist chic that has shaped engagement-ring tastes in recent years. (In 2018, Hailey Bieber’s ring—an oval-cut diamond on a thin, solitaire band—set the standard.)
Swift’s diamond is an old-mine cut—a faceting pattern that typically indicates that a gem was cut in a period between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the world’s major diamond mines were still in Brazil and India. Lubeck couldn’t share the stone’s provenance. On social media, the rare-gem dealer Anup Jogani, who supplied Lubeck with the stones for her recent Sotheby’s auctions, called it the “ring of the century.”
In the antique-jewelry scene, the reveal was the equivalent of a Super Bowl victory. “I think I cried,” Marion Fasel, the author of “The History of Diamond Engagement Rings,” told me. “My vintage-jewelry world was so excited—they lost their minds.” Historically, old-mine-cut diamonds have been a niche obsession. Compared with the ubiquitous round-brilliant cut of today (think: diamond emoji), old-miners tend to have large, chunky facets and taller profiles, with thick crowns and long pavilions. Fasel was able to classify Swift’s ring as an old-miner because of the small, dark circle, or “open culet,” visible at the center—unlike many popular diamond shapes today, which taper to a point, old-miners have flatter bottoms.
At the time these stones were fashioned, light was often provided by candlelight or gas lamps and lapidaries, or gem cutters, did everything by hand, meaning that their work was not always perfectly symmetrical. Compared with modern cuts, which are often described as “sharp,” “intense,” and “quick” for the way that they refract white, or “brilliant” light, old-miners manifest a different kind of romantic fantasy, with a warm glow that calls to mind the sepia of an old Hollywood movie. “I just watch it like it’s a TV,” Swift said, of her ring.
At the Sim Gems USA showroom, Mehta gestured at a table that had been laid out with dozens of shimmering, round, brilliant-cut diamonds worth millions of dollars. “These are regular,” he said, shrugging. “People know what this is. But after what happened”—he glanced at Lubeck—“people are looking for something different.”
The natural-diamond industry, which, with the advent of lab-grown gems, has been experiencing a prolonged and costly identity crisis, was thrilled by the ring, too. “What a diamond!” Al Cook, the beleaguered C.E.O. of De Beers Group, wrote in a LinkedIn post, which restrained itself to only one awkwardly interjected Swift lyric. (“Bejeweled!”) Cook became C.E.O. in 2023, not long before the business’s majority shareholder announced its intention to divest from the company. Later that year, De Beers cut prices across the board by more than ten per cent—a historically large reduction, according to Bloomberg. “Taylor’s ring might be extraordinary in its size and rarity,” Cook wrote. “But it is a reminder that every natural diamond is a unique and ancient treasure from the Earth.”
De Beers was formed in the late nineteenth century, when its reviled founder, Cecil Rhodes, consolidated the operations of a network of mines in South Africa, securing near-total control of the market there. Since then, the history of diamonds has essentially been a history of De Beers’s marketing campaigns. The company spent the better part of the twentieth century convincing Americans that the most valuable diamonds were heavy, brilliant, colorless, and free from internal flaws or external blemishes. But achieving this sort of purity is precisely what lab-grown diamonds do best.
In 2016, according to one industry analyst, a high-quality one-and-a-half-carat lab-grown diamond could sell for about ten thousand dollars—seventeen per cent less than the cost of a similar-quality natural diamond. Today, amid a glut of competition from labs in China and India, the price difference can be as high as ninety per cent. At Walmart, which started selling diamonds in 2022, a one-carat, lab-grown, round-cut solitaire engagement ring might retail for a hundred and fifty dollars. The natural-diamond industry seems to be betting that this price collapse will deter customers who want their rings to cost a meaningful amount of money. (There is still a prevailing belief that a diamond ring ought to cost a man two months of his salary—an idea that came from an old De Beers ad campaign which has taken on a life of its own since.)
But Americans love a good deal. A recent survey by the wedding-planning website the Knot found that more than half the engagement rings purchased in the U.S. featured lab-grown diamonds, a forty-per-cent increase from 2019. Last year, when the Natural Diamond Council put up fly posters in midtown Manhattan that featured blown-up photos of identical-looking diamonds labelled natural—“the OG”—and lab-grown—“the dupe”—it seemed only to underscore that we live in a society in which even wealthy women are buying Wirkins. Swift’s engagement ring might have set Kelce back something like a million dollars. But at Vrai, a lab-grown brand favored by Swift, fans can buy their own elongated, cushion-cut diamond for a thousand dollars or so.
“In the past, most people bought small, low-quality diamonds to fit in their budget, so there was an imbalance between what you desired and your reality,” Jean Dousset, a great-great-grandson of Louis Cartier, told me. After working in the high-jewelry business for decades at well-established houses such as Van Cleef & Arpels, he started his own brand in Los Angeles. Diamonds are typically graded based on four criteria: cut, clarity, color, and carat weight; shopping for one can become an exercise in deciding how much imperfection a couple is willing to tolerate in a symbol of their love. Dousset told me that he grew tired of selling couples natural diamonds with yellow coloring and internal flaws that cost tens of thousands of dollars. He didn’t feel that the price was worth it, and he saw the stress and tension it caused people. He pivoted entirely to lab-grown diamonds in 2023. (“I haven’t heard from my peers since,” he said.) Now it’s much easier for him to sell people what they want. The industry has “found the cure to enjoying buying diamonds,” Dousset said.
For some couples, synthetic diamonds have an ethical appeal. In the nineties, ghastly revelations about the mining conditions in countries such as Sierra Leone, shed harsh light on the back end of the business. Leonardo DiCaprio, the star of “Blood Diamond,” a blockbuster of dubious quality that nonetheless raised awareness about the issue, told Time that he would “certainly not” let his date wear diamonds to the Oscars, and later invested in Diamond Foundry, the most prominent American producer of lab-grown diamonds. Things have gotten better. In 2003, the United Nations implemented the Kimberley Process, a certification system to deter illegal trade; the program has eighty-six participating countries, and it is widely considered to be a successful intervention. But the taint lingers: bad actors still exist; mined diamonds figure in global money-laundering operations; and whatever its current partnerships De Beers was, after all, a company built on colonial exploitation. The sister of one of my friends, a sustainability adviser, told me last year that she gave her now fiancé explicit instructions that she did not want a “blood diamond.”
Still, lab-grown diamonds have yet to fully overcome their name. Christine Cheng, a fine-jewelry specialist, put it this way: Would you rather have a diamond formed naturally in the earth, “over millions of years,” or one “cooked in a microwave, basically?” She told me that antique diamonds offer a “secret third” option for buyers. “They were mined long ago, so we’re not using new resources,” she said. “When everyone has access now to a huge diamond that used to be the dream, how do you differentiate? How do you signal your taste? How do you signal your knowledge? It’s through connoisseurship of certain cuts, of certain designs from previous eras, and/or personalization. The status comes from a story.”
Very little about modern life is romantic; we get our thrills where we can. Gabrielle Katz, a publicist in New York who works with bridal businesses, told me that, after going through the indignities of looking for love on the apps, she wanted a ring that anchored her to a different sort of tradition. “I really went through the wringer with dating, so I was getting the real thing, in both a husband and a ring,” she said. Her fiancé proposed to her with an old-mine-cut diamond last summer, shortly before news broke of Swift’s engagement. “I have to be honest: thank God I had it first,” she told me.
The supply of antique diamonds is limited, so their audience will likely remain niche. If the status is in the story, then couples who swore off “blood diamonds” might not feel all that inclined to buy into a narrative that elides the conditions in which these gems were discovered; the alluvial diamond mines in, say, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Brazil were largely run by enslaved laborers. Still, the aesthetic influence of stones like Swift’s is transforming the jewelry world. “Judging by the tens of millions of people who are showing their excitement on Instagram, we can now expect a resurgence in old mine cuts and other heritage ring designs,” Al Cook, the De Beers C.E.O., wrote. Simone Paasche, the co-founder of Spur Jewelry, a company that adapts heirloom jewels to modern tastes, told me that she’s seeing fewer “finance-bro engagement-ring flexes”—round, brilliant-cut diamond rings that cost something between twenty and thirty-five thousand dollars. Instead, people are requesting the sort of hand-engraving and antique-cut gems in which Lubeck specializes. There’s been an uptick in customers asking for something “ancient,” she said.
To remain relevant, natural-diamond companies are rewriting narratives about rarity and perfection, even if it means contradicting themselves. Brown diamonds, once considered so worthless that they were sometimes used in drill bits, are seeing a resurgence, as are other stones that have been considered “cloudy,” “milky,” and “textured.” In October, De Beers launched a campaign called Desert Diamonds, touting a collection of earth-toned diamonds that its executives likely would have sniffed at thirty years ago. After a press trip to Namibia, which was sponsored by De Beers, Tariro Makoni, a writer and brand strategist, wrote, “In my book— Cut, Color, Clarity is being replaced by Cut, Color, Clarity, and CHARACTER.”
After Sim Gems, Lubeck took me around the corner to a gemstones, diamonds, and jewelry wholesaler co-founded by Jay Moncada, whom Lubeck met at the Ethical Gem Fair in Brooklyn in 2023. The business sources stones that are much smaller and less rare than the ones we’d seen earlier that day, priced in the tens of thousands rather than the millions. More “down to earth,” Lubeck said.
In his office, Moncada, who was wearing jeans and a plaid button-down, pulled out a small Peruzzi-cut diamond. From some angles, it looked green; from others, it looked honey-yellow. “There’s so much happening in this one, I’m going a little bit cross-eyed,” Lubeck said, placing it in between the crevice of her ring and middle fingers. She passed me the magnifying glass. “Being in the era of A.I., when everything’s feeling computerized and automated, [it’s exciting] to get a stone where you’re, like, ‘This doesn’t look anything like that,’ ” she said. “There’s no uniformity. It doesn’t look machined—there was a human behind it. I think for me, that’s a huge draw. And I think I’m not alone in that.”
I’ll admit it: up until that moment, diamonds were not doing it for me. Garish gems seemed to be everywhere I looked. They distracted me during New York Fashion Week, when editors waved them around in the front row. Recently, on the subway, when a woman took her hand out of her pocket to reveal a diamond the size of a peanut M&M’s, I found myself blurting out, “Holy shit,” and reflexively backing away. Before meeting up with Lubeck, I had read a market analysis by McKinsey & Company that laid out, among other possibilities, a nightmare scenario for the mainstream diamond industry: “assuming consumers cannot tell the difference between natural stones and LGDs”—lab-grown diamonds—“all diamonds could simply go out of fashion, lose their appeal, and are no longer seen as a must-have for engagement rings.” It didn’t seem like such a bad outcome. Jewelers like Lubeck would be fine, and there are plenty of other alluring stones out there, like Montana sapphires. Of all the twentieth-century institutions to tear down, a place such as De Beers didn’t seem like the worst candidate.
Still, I was transfixed by the honeydew diamond. I thought back to a conversation that I’d had with Ope Omojola, a Brooklyn-based jewelry designer who prefers to work with natural stones. “They look like little terrariums,” she told me. “There are all of these geological circumstances that create unusual phenomena. Like, O.K., so you’re telling me that because of the circumstances of dripping water, heat, time, and all of these other things, now this piece of quartz has a blob of water trapped inside of it? And that water is tens of millions of years old? That’s crazy.” I imagined the many hands that the stone had passed through, the multiple marriages it might have seen. There was an appeal to the idea of an engagement ring that carried in it a residue of life.
Lubeck asked Moncada for a UV light. Sometimes diamonds undergo an elementary reaction during the crystallization process which produces a fluorescent glow under the UV. “I’m just always looking for weird things,” she said, with a shrug. The diamond lit up like a blue glow stick at a rave. This time, I was the one to gasp. “You’re telling me that if I wore this to laser tag or a bowling alley everyone else’s ring would stay quiet, and mine would—” I gestured as though a firework were exploding off my hand. Lubeck nodded and laughed: “Anything for a little attention.” ♦
Emilia Petrarca, formerly a senior fashion writer at The Cut, writes the weekly newsletter “Shop Rat.”
Read More
On and Off the Avenue
[
A Holiday Gift Guide: Treasures That Are Old, or Old at Heart
The app might wreak havoc on users’ mental health, but there was a satisfying frankness at the gathering about the fact that everything in life is now fodder for content.
.gif)