When Katherine Pokorny’s divorce became final in the summer of 2021, she had already been in touch with Ali Galgano of Serpentine Jewels about transforming her engagement ring into a divorce ring. “Repurposing jewellery from past boyfriends and lovers has rarely been public-facing, but we are seeing a shift in which women are reclaiming their power everywhere,” says Galgano, a jeweller based in Greenwich, Connecticut. “I saw a significant increase in this last year, where we did triple the number of divorce-ring resets as in 2022. Before 2020, this concept wasn’t even on our clients’ radars.”
Pokorny, a public relations consultant in Aspen, Colorado, wanted a toi-et-moi style, pairing an emerald stone with her original emerald-cut diamond. “This project gave new meaning to the term retail therapy,” jokes Pokorny, who also marked her separation by buying a 1991 Mitsubishi Montero, a car she had always wanted but that her ex-husband had deemed unsafe. “The diamond represents a 10-year period in my life, and the emerald, my birthstone, is a reminder that I’m capable of saving myself.”
Historically, divorce rings were “mournful jewels,” says Rachel Church, an author and the former jewellery curator at the Victoria & Albert museum in London. The style was meant to send a social signal, “letting people know not to inquire about your husband or to show that you weren’t an unmarried mother,” she adds. But modern iterations lack “any hint of mourning,” says Church. “There isn’t the same need to identify yourself as divorced in that way.”
Stephanie Gottlieb, a New York-based jewellery designer, explained that the meaning of a divorce ring today depends on how the marriage in question ended. “For some, the new ring is an act of rebellion, while, for others, it honours the old and new all at once,” she says, adding that designing divorce rings has become a consistent part of her business. For one client, she created a divorce ring with black diamonds because it “felt like the antithesis of a bridal piece”. For another, Gottlieb used the client’s birthstone to symbolise a “gift to self”. In others, Gottlieb has incorporated a client’s child’s birthstone as a “nod to the family life she’s built”.
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To make divorce rings less engagementlike, Judith Hoetker, 50, head goldsmith at Reinstein Ross, recommends changing the ring completely: playing with the proportions of the ring band, adding more stones to the ring to take the emphasis off the original diamond, swapping the finger or hand on which the ring is worn (some say a middle finger is fitting), incorporating colour or choosing a new style. Hoetker has seen a 25 per cent increase in divorce rings between 2023 and this year.
Madison Snider, 31, founder and CEO of Fewer Finer, a jewellery brand, restyled a client’s classic solitaire diamond ring into an evil eye-shaped signet ring, with the diamond in its centre, to mark the client’s divorce. Inside the ring, Snider engraved the word ‘badass,’ which she said is how the client felt after the transformation.
“Breaking the association from the original ring is important,” says Rachel Boston, a London-based jeweller. “Turning it into a completely different type of jewellery is a great way to do this. Emily Ratajkowski’s original toi-et-moi ring was hugely popular, and these new rings will no doubt be equally influential.”
The New York Times
