Celebrity engagements are a spectator sport. Each ring arrives like a season finale: dissected, debated, endlessly zoomed in on. This week, Elsa Hosk debuted an oval-cut, five-carat diamond that could almost be considered conservative against the backdrop of today’s supersized celebrity engagement rings. In 2025, size matters.
Earlier this year, Georgina Rodríguez revealed her enormous oval ring, reportedly worth up to $5 million, a stone that, as Frank Everett, vice chairman of Sotheby’s Jewelry, notes, is “closer in scale to a cocktail ring.”
“I love the idea of having a 30-carat diamond ring in your collection,” he says. “But I believe an engagement ring is something you should be able to wear at all times, and it takes a lot of confidence to pull off 20-plus carats every day, everywhere you go.”
Instagram content
Still dramatic, but more of an insider’s flex, is Taylor Swift’s antique cushion, a cut prized by collectors for its soft, pillowy shape. Old stones like hers often have an open culet—the tiny, flat facet at the very bottom of the diamond that gives vintage cuts their distinctive, more muted glow. “The antique cushion has been an insider stone forever,” Everett says. “There’s always been a small but passionate group of buyers looking for those, and great old ones are rare.”
Lauren Sánchez’s 30-carat pink cushion-cut, practically a character in its own right, pushes the aesthetic to its logical extreme. Once a stone passes the 10-carat mark, it starts to behave differently: you have to take it off for all kinds of reasons, and if you can’t wear it habitually, then is it really an engagement ring anymore? This is the point where the ring becomes a status symbol first and a symbol of commitment second. And with the rise of the perfectly staged ring shot, it becomes content, too.
New York-based jewelry designer Sarah Dyne points out that, in today’s market, size isn’t the problem, proportion is. “Sometimes a large surface area on the finger is actually very flattering,” she says. “But it’s really about the harmony the stone has with the metal around it. When a stone sits too high, it feels like it’s just stuck on top rather than integrated into the design.” For Dyne, this is what separates a great big diamond from a gaudy one: the way the shank, prongs, and any halo work together in balance. It’s when those details fight that you get the dreaded ring-pop, costume-jewelry effect.
Everett places today’s mega-rings in a long continuum. “When you go back to some of the great collections of the ’20s and ’30s, they always had a giant diamond,” he says. “The big houses were making major diamond rings in the Art-Deco period, but they were worn like evening rings, the way you’d also have a colored stone ring with a huge emerald or sapphire.”
By the mid-century, Hollywood and royalty had made the oversized diamond an object of public fascination. Grace Kelly’s 10.47-carat Cartier emerald-cut set the template for the fairytale engagement ring, while Elizabeth Taylor’s 33-carat Asscher-cut diamond became part of her forever-referenced jewelry legacy. Fast-forward to Palm Beach in the 1980s and ’90s, and a big emerald-cut Harry Winston was practically standard issue. Jewelry wasn’t discreet; it was a power move. Think Bunny Mellon with her Schlumberger rings, or Nan Kempner in her matching parures: glamour was expected, but it was occasion-based.
What’s new isn’t the size, but the blurring of categories. Cocktail ring, engagement ring, daily ring—they’re all the same now, and they’re all on display. Gargantuan stones are no longer reserved for royalty or tucked away for a gala; they’re part of the daily uniform, broadcast to a global audience.
And that’s the cultural shift these rings reflect: there is nothing quiet about luxury in the celebrity sphere right now—at least not if you measure it in carats. Seen this way, the supersized engagement ring isn’t just a jewelry trend; it’s the canary in the coal mine for a bigger cultural shift, a declaration that glamour no longer need be discreet. As Everett sums it up, “I’m all about a giant diamond ring—for everybody that can afford it.”
But maybe that 30-carat diamond belongs on your cocktail-ring finger.