Emerald Cut Pink Ice Ring with Scroll Designed Sides in 10k Yellow Gold

One large emerald cut pink ice fills the whole top of this ring, held at the corners by four yellow gold prongs and nothing else. The colour runs even from edge to edge across a very wide table, which is the only way a stone cut this open can work — there is no brilliant sparkle to break up a colour that shifts. Either side, the shoulders are pierced right through into S-curl scrolls in polished 10k yellow gold, so daylight passes behind the metal instead of stopping at it. 7.70 grams, and the stone spans very nearly the full width of the finger.

The openwork is doing more than decoration. A stone this size on a solid shank sits like a paperweight — all the visual weight ends up at the bottom of the ring and the top looks stuck on. Cutting the shoulders open moves that weight off: you see through them to the skin, the shank reads narrow, and the stone reads as the whole point rather than as a lid. It also means every scroll has an inside edge that has to be filed and polished, on a surface nobody sees unless they turn the ring over. That is a lot of trouble to take so that something looks light. Which would you rather — a ring that weighs on the hand, or one that only looks like it should?