Hello! I’m Liz Angell, an editor on the Pursuits team, here this week to persuade you to redesign your engagement ring. 

Lots of jewelry has symbolic and sentimental value, but perhaps no piece has more than an engagement ring. But yours might no longer fit or be comfortable. It might have gotten dinged up or damaged. You might have only had the resources for a small diamond when you first got engaged. Or, like me, you might just be ready for a change. 

That’s all OK. It can feel fraught to admit you want something new, but sentiment and symbolism should not get in the way of wearing—really wearing—something you love.

“If your original ring makes you want to put it in a jewelry box and walk away, then what’s the point?” says Stellene Volandes, a jewelry expert and the author of Jeweler: Masters, Mavericks, and Visionaries of Modern Design. (Volandes is also editor-in-chief of Town & Country and the editorial director of Elle Decor.)

I redesigned my own engagement ring two years ago. When my husband and I first decided to get married (18 years ago!), he told me that his great-grandmother had left him a diamond for just this purpose. (Her name was Florence, nickname Flossie, so we called it the Flossie diamond.) Together we leafed through a binder of designs in a tiny store in one of those jam-packed buildings on 47th Street in Manhattan, New York’s Diamond District. The jeweler was friendly but gruff and visibly armed—many jewelers are, I learned—and the experience was not relaxing. 

Source: Elizabeth Angell

I realized almost immediately that I had no idea what I actually wanted. This was disorienting for me; I know what I want in virtually every situation. I’ve never had trouble choosing shoes or kitchen faucets or dinner-party menus; I’m usually in and out of a Netflix menu in under 60 seconds. But the magnitude of designing a ring from scratch, something that I would love forever and that would somehow embody my relationship—well, it was too much. I went blank.

“Some people buy jewelry all the time, but for most of us, the occasion only comes along every couple of years, so of course we’re not as confident about it,” says Valery Brinda, a Brooklyn-based jeweler.

In hopes of creating something timeless, I originally ended up with something boring: a simple platinum band with a pronged setting perched on top. But I was in love, and I was excited about the future, and this ring symbolized that. I loved wearing it.

Over time, though, I wore it less and less—that chunky band wasn’t so comfortable, and the prongs of the setting really protruded. Then during the pandemic, I stopped wearing it altogether. That made me sad.

I suspect that my husband may have been a bit wistful when I told him that I wanted to change things, but he said I should do whatever I wanted, and I took him at his word. I vowed not to overthink it this time around. Instead of the MOST PERFECT RING OF ALL TIME, I just thought about choosing something I liked at the moment. This helped me shake off my decision paralysis. 

“Your taste in clothing changes. The kind of car you want to drive, the house you want to live in—why not your ring?” says Brinda. She’s the designer I eventually went to for the redesign after a tip from a friend and liking what I saw on her website.

Source: Valery Brinda

This is important: Don’t work with a designer whose work you’re not crazy about. That might seem obvious, but Brinda says people come to see her with inspiration images that look nothing like her work. She steers them in a different direction.

Brinda was easy to talk to, did not have a gun (at least that I could see) and explained to me that the design process would be a collaboration. She’d develop sketches based on our conversation, then make a model I could try on. I would have time to tweak it. And if I didn’t love what we came up with, I was under no obligation to proceed. We openly discussed timing and pricing, generally between $1,700 and $6,500, so there were no surprises.

The only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to use the Flossie diamond. (According to Volandes, that’s probably about the only rule of engagement-ring redesign: Use your original stone—“even if you add a bigger stone to it,” she notes.) And this time around, I wanted gold. I like its warmth. 

In the aughts, says Volandes, “yellow gold with a diamond felt a little Dynasty. Now it feels like a glamorous, retro Hollywood statement. And of course Taylor Swift chose yellow gold.” 

Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

“Most of the time, people come in knowing what they don’t want more than what they do,” says jeweler Jillian Sassone, founder of Marrow Fine, who frequently reworks vintage and heirloom pieces. “I tell them to bring inspiration—photos, sketches or even a few words that capture a feeling, like delicate, architectural, bold, vintage-inspired. Those words help me understand what you’re resonating with or gravitating towards, not just the literal look.”

Though I admired lots of more intricate, art deco styles, I’d come to realize that my personal taste ran to simpler, less delicate—if not outright chunky—pieces. I realized I like a bezel setting (a continuous band of metal holding the stone in place) better than a prong. Valery suggested we set a few tiny diamonds into the bezel, which would echo the diamonds in my wedding band.

Photographer: Joanna McClure for Bloomberg Businessweek; Prop stylist: Sonia Rentsch

After sketching a few things, she made me a hard wax model of our design. I liked it, but the setting floated on top of the band and protruded more than I wanted it to. She revised it. I wore the little model around my apartment for a few days, playing with it on my finger, trying to imagine what the purple wax would look like when translated into gold and diamonds.

I took a deep breath, then told Brinda to go for it. For about a month, I waited, worried I’d made the same mistakes all over again. But when the ring arrived, I loved it. I’ve worn it almost every day since. (Brinda liked it so much too that she made it part of her line, and she tells me, her head of workshop just chose it as her engagement ring!)

I wonder, sometimes, if the urge to redesign will strike me again. If my husband and I are lucky to make it 18 more years, maybe Flossie will get yet another makeover. Feels like just the right metaphor for a marriage if you ask me.

Add it to the queue

On the first episode of The Mishal Husain Show, a new podcast from Bloomberg Weekend, Mishal is joined by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. Just seven months into the job of running a country at the forefront of the disrupted world, Carney talks to Mishal about trade battles, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s miscalculations and what he’s learned from President Donald Trump. Make sense of the world with one essential conversation every weekend with The Mishal Husain Show, available on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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I loved Gordy Megroz’s story about skiing in Austria’s Montafon Valley. I’ve had the privilege of visiting—and skiing—in this part of the world, and it’s unlike any other place I’ve been. The mountains are staggeringly beautiful, the snow is a dream, and Austrian desserts are, well, they’re legendary for a reason.

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