Elevate Your Love: Custom Engagement Ring Trends for 2025

An engagement ring is not just a fashion statement, It is a chance to express the kind of consumer you want to be when making a meaningful purchase.  When having a piece of jewelry made to commemorate your partnership, we encourage you to be inspired by art, nature, and the richness of jewelry history, and to celebrate your unique personality. If you arevhaving an engagement ring custom made, It is important to consider the context of the times. In the last 20 years I have designed thousands of custom engagement rings and this year I anticipate our clients thinking about the ethics of labor, mass production, and environmental impact. New technology, such as lab grown diamonds and gemstones, as well as global trends forcing up the prices of precious metals all contribute to the design landscape. 

From Nana with Love: Incorporating Heirlooms

Maybe you are re-using your nanas’ ring from 100 years ago with a quick change in finger size and restorative polish.  Perhaps your family’s outdated and bulky marquise diamond ring feels more like an albatross than a treasure. No matter how gaudy, outdated, or worn out, most family heirlooms can contribute to outfitting you and your partner with meaningful jewelry to wear into life’s next chapter.  Gold can always be repurposed, and diamonds often won’t have aged a day, making them meaningful, sustainable elements to incorporate into your custom project.  

Carats Galore: Large Diamonds

New strides in technology have created inroads for a new class of diamond customer.  Laboratory grown diamonds are chemically identical to their natural cousins in all the important metrics and are even certified by the US’s most prestigious gem laboratory, the GIA. With prices at a fraction of their mined counterparts, lab diamonds bring accessibility to fleets of new customers.  Once upon a time, the genuine, nearly flawless, two-carat plus sparkler used to be a mark of only the most aspirational levels of wealth. Now you can simply ask yourself what size you want to wear and what suits your design best, with the price differences in diamond size barely moving the budgetary needle.  Combined with their advantages over mined diamonds in environmental impact, lab grown diamonds are a win-win option for most.  Even with all the increases in inflation, labor, and precious metal cost in the last 25 years, this technology has contributed to many styles of engagement ring being more affordable than ever.  Incorporating a lab grown diamond makes it possible for the once benchmark one-carat diamond solitaire engagement ring to be sold for half to a third the price in today’s market than it was in the year 2000. Additionally, the bigger a stone size you choose, the more that gap in price widens.  For those of us whose diamond taste spans the glamourous, to (dare we say) the gaudy, it is an exciting time.

Exuberant Color: A Rainbow of Sapphires

With scores of large, lab-grown diamonds hitting the markets, there will always be a client who seeks a different approach.  Enter the sapphire. Superseded in hardness on Mohs scale only by the diamond, they are incredibly beautiful and one of the few colorful gemstones suitable for daily wear. A sapphire In an unusual natural specimen, for example a vibrant, pearlescent lavender, color serves to emphasize the wonder and diversity of nature.  Natural sapphires may come in almost every color, but finding two that are alike is nearly impossible.  When you fall in love with an unusual specimen, your ring will be extremely distinctive.  Even when seeking a high quality laboratory grown sapphire choosing a colorful gem serves as a dose of personality and individualism. 

Sculptural Elements in Yellow Gold

Although gold as a commodity has hit an all time high,and therefore is a more expensive metal choice than ever, its popularity has been on the significant uptick. Those of us who work with gold know that the amazing and unique properties that make it such a delight to craft with also make it a joy to wear.  It is a fabulous material. Rich and beautiful in color, with a satisfying weigh and heft, it is incredibly serviceable and reuseable.  The way gold is used in a design also has deep cultural and historical significance that can inform a project beautifully.

Opposites attract: the Moi-et-Toi Engagement Ring

In ring design, the name moi-et-toi, French for “you and me” refers to a ring featuring two distinct stones, each of which is large and distinctive enough, it could serve as an engagement ring on its own. Moi-et-toi are all about juxtaposition, and what could be a better metaphor for marriage than a design which picks not one, but two stones, which complement each other by visually balancing their differences.  We also love how this design lets the client pick two favorites to feature, it’s a gemstone lovers dream!