For Queer Couples, Engagement Rings With Subversive Stones

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Field Notes

As one jeweler put it, many of her L.G.B.T.Q. clients want "the opposite of what a diamond is supposed to stand for." Sapphires, opals and other nontraditional stones have in turn grown more coveted.

By Abigail Covington

Salt-and-pepper diamonds used to be a hard sell according to the jewelry designer Lori Linkous Devine.

"They were the reject diamonds back in the day," said Mx. Devine, the founder of Lolide, who uses a gender neutral courtesy title. The stones’ gray color and mottled clarity were seen as flaws.

Mx. Devine, who lives in Seattle, has been making jewelry "for every gender and gender identity," as she put it, since 2010. In 2016, she began to advertise her products specifically to L.G.B.T.Q. customers. "It was after Trump was elected and I had a whole breakdown," Mx. Devine said. "I started looking at what I can do with this business that will feel good."

She soon noticed a trend among those clients, who she says now account for at least a quarter of her business. When shopping for engagement rings, many want "the opposite of what a diamond is supposed to stand for," she said, and are "seeking out the flawed."

As a result, Mx. Devine and other experts say that once overlooked stones like salt-and-pepper diamonds, as well as other nontraditional varieties, have become more coveted.

"Gone are the days where we want to look like everybody else," said Kirsten Palladino, who with her spouse, Maria Palladino, runs Equally Wed, a digital magazine with a focus on L.G.B.T.Q. weddings. "The trend among couples featured on Equally Wed is to wear jewelry that is special to them."

When Tim Bell, a human resources manager at Prudential Financial, and Joshua Farrar, a senior associate of client operations at Daybreak Health, became engaged in March, Mr. Bell, 30, proposed using an inexpensive ring knowing that Mr. Farrar, 29, wanted to pick out a proper engagement ring on his own.

For his actual ring, Mr. Farrar desired something unconventional. As a gay man, "I’ve been defying what I’ve been expected to do my whole life," he said, adding, "The symbol of love that's on my left hand, it needs to be a reflection of that." Another requirement was that the ring have a stone.

Mr. Farrar, who lives with Mr. Bell in New York, said "the normal, clear, standard engagement diamond" did not interest him. He was instead drawn to cognac diamonds, which can have a range of gold, brown and amber hues that Mr. Farrar said "achieved the masculine and feminine quality" he sought in a center stone.

When Mr. Farrar met with some jewelers in New York's diamond district, they questioned his preference for cognac diamonds, telling him that their saturated color makes them inferior in clarity, a traditional marker of diamond quality.

"You don't want that," Mr. Farrar said of their advice. "But I do want that," he told the jewelers in reply.

After that experience, Mr. Farrar took his search to Automic Gold, a jewelry brand in New York that he had first encountered on Instagram. In emails with the line's designer, AL Sandimirova, who is known for making inclusive jewelry, Mr. Farrar discussed his vision for his engagement ring.

Mx. Sandimirova presented Mr. Farrar with a selection of cognac diamonds as well as a salt-and-pepper diamond. Mr. Farrar said the latter stone "just spoke to him," and ultimately went with a salt-and-pepper diamond ring.

A salt-and-pepper diamond was also the stone chosen by Roxy Valle, a 31-year-old drag king performer who has worked in television production, when designing an engagement ring for Taylor Orci, 39, a television screenwriter and story editor. The couple, who live in Los Angeles, were married in July.

The stone's unconventionality was one reason Mx. Valle, who is transgender and nonbinary, chose to use it in the ring for Mx. Orci, who is nonbinary. Mx. Valle also liked how, compared to a clear diamond, the salt-and-pepper variety has a subtler sparkle.

"It has a great granite-like reflection on it, which is bright, but also rugged and rough," said Mx. Valle, who paid $2,250 for the ring from Kris Averi, a jewelry line in New York.

Haley Biemiller, a co-founder of the jewelry line Venvs, which specializes in "atypical" stones including salt-and-pepper diamonds, says another style favored by the brand's queer clients is moissanite. Grown in labs, moissanite looks more like a clear diamond and is almost as durable, she explained, but "sparkles a little bit more like a rainbow." A half-carat moissanite sells for around $400 at Venvs, while a 2.25-carat stone can cost $1,500, according to the line's co-founder Sam Indelicato.

Ms. Biemiller and Mr. Indelicato started Venvs in Rochester, N.Y., in 2020, after Ms. Biemiller's experience shopping for an engagement ring for her same-sex partner. At the luxury chain jeweler she visited, Ms. Biemiller said she felt overlooked by the sales staff, a number of whom made a point to approach a male customer who walked in after she did.

"They assume that a woman is just window shopping," Ms. Biemiller said. "So they don't give you the time of day."

Though salt-and-pepper diamonds and moissanite have become popular, jewelers including Kris Harvey, the designer of Kris Averi, say that most of their L.G.B.T.Q. customers seeking engagement rings with stones prefer varieties that are neither related to diamonds, nor bear resemblance to them. Those clients tend to choose sapphires, and often, Montana sapphires.

While sapphires are known for their blue color, Montana sapphires can be yellow, pink, gray or teal. Like traditional sapphires, the Montana variety can be bicolor, meaning an individual stone has two hues, and some can change colors depending on the light, said Emily Chelsea, who designs a namesake line of jewelry in Philadelphia.

"The Montana sapphires that I’m drawn to usually show three colors," Ms. Chelsea said, adding that Montana-sapphire rings from her line start at $1,500 and can cost as much as $8,500.

L.G.B.T.Q. clients account for 65 percent of Ms. Chelsea's customers, she said, and are generally not interested in following heteronormative traditions. "We aren't seeing that," Ms. Chelsea said. "We tell people all the time, do whatever the hell you want."

While they look different than diamonds, sapphires are nearly as durable. The same cannot be said for opal, a vibrant but softer stone that several jewelers say has become another diamond alternative. "Queer people really like all of the unique, shiny, colorful stones," said Mx. Sandimirova of Automic Gold, where one-carat Ethiopian opals sell for around $180 and one-carat Australian opals, which are of higher quality, cost $750.

Because opals are about twice as soft as diamonds, they are more susceptible to breaking and can start to deteriorate within two years, Mx. Sandimirova said. For these reasons, Mx. Devine, the Lolide designer, won't make rings with opal, and Ms. Biemiller of Venvs urges clients to consider something sturdier.

Moss agate, which is slightly harder than opal, has also risen in demand. The stone can be clear or have a semi-translucent milky white tone, and features stringy green inclusions that give it a mossy appearance. Allison Ullmer says it's a popular choice among the L.G.B.T.Q. customers at Ringed, her business in Portland, Ore., which leads workshops for couples who want to make their own engagement rings.

Ringed's moss agates range from 2.5 to 3.5 in carat weight, and retail for between $240 and $400. Because the stone can also start to deteriorate within years, Ms. Ullmer requires customers who want to use it to purchase two versions of their ring (one is a backup).

Ms. Ullmer, who said L.G.B.T.Q. clients account for almost 40 percent of her customers, attributed moss agate's appeal to the stone being less flashy and more "gender neutral" than others used in engagement rings.

She added that when a customer comes to Ringed looking to design jewelry that is gender neutral, she immediately asks them to define the term for her. "I’m not making one assumption about how they define that," Ms. Ullmer said.

Mx. Harvey, the Kris Averi designer, said that defining gender-neutral jewelry can even be difficult for some of her clients who ask for it. Which is why choosing an engagement ring, she added, is "about honoring your identity, from your presentation to your pronouns," no matter the stone, cut or band.

At the Emily Chelsea jewelry store in Philadelphia and on the brand's website, "We don't call any of our rings ‘engagement rings’ or ‘wedding bands’ or men's and women's bands," Ms. Chelsea said. Instead, her company uses the terms "wide bands," "thin bands" and "rings with a center stone," all of which recall the more inclusive language that some couples are using to define themselves and their unions.

As she put it, "anyone can wear any ring."

An earlier version of this article misstated the given name of a co-founder of Equally Wed. She is Kirsten Palladino, not Kristen.

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