190 Years of "I Do": The Blacklock Journey Through the Engagement Ring

Diamonds in the early 1800s were cut by hand, producing a soft, glimmering rose cut rather than the fire of a modern brilliant. Because rose cuts can look pale from certain angles, jewellers set them in closed-back mounts lined with foil, reflecting light back through the stone.
A single diamond rarely had the presence to stand alone, so Georgian rings favoured clusters: several small stones gathered into a flowerhead, giving scale and sparkle no individual stone could manage alone. It's the aesthetic Blacklock was born into in 1832, and — as it happens — the same idea, reworked for modern taste, sits at the heart of our Hawthorn collection today.

When Prince Albert gave Queen Victoria a gold serpent ring with an emerald head in 1840 — the snake symbolising eternal love, the ring itself an unbroken circle — it set off a fashion for symbolic jewellery almost overnight, one of the earliest examples of a royal engagement shaping public opinion and taste.

Victorian rings leaned into sentiment over size: forget-me-nots, hairwork compartments, old mine cut diamonds paired with garnet and seed pearl. Diamonds only became attainable outside the aristocracy once South African deposits were discovered from 1867, and cluster and coronet settings flourished as a result.

The single biggest technical leap after the rose cut itself arrived around 1901: the oxy-acetylene torch made platinum reliably workable for the first time, and jewellers began crafting settings as fine as lace — millegrain edges, knife-edge shoulders, openwork galleries borrowed from textile and ribbon-bow motifs.

Where Victorian rings were solid and substantial, Edwardian rings were engineered to look as though they were barely there at all, letting light move around the stone rather than bouncing off a heavy mount.

By the 1920s, jewellery had started borrowing its vocabulary from skyscrapers and ocean liners rather than lace and flowers. Art Deco rings are symmetrical, geometric and unapologetically modern — coloured stones cut precisely to frame a central diamond, baguettes flanking a round or emerald-cut stone in strict formation, made possible only once diamond cutting itself had been mechanised.

That geometry remains one reason emerald cut diamond engagement rings continue to feel so closely associated with the Art Deco aesthetic. Their clean lines and elongated proportions sit naturally within the period's preference for symmetry and architectural form.

It's a decade we still draw on directly — our Force collection takes its architecture and confidence straight from this era, and it remains the most consistently requested vintage style for exactly that reason: it still looks forward rather than back.

Platinum was requisitioned for military use during the Second World War, pushing jewellers back to bold, sculptural gold and silver designs. Blacklock kept trading through it, selling palladium jewellery and military insignia brooches while platinum was unavailable.

Then came the moment that arguably shaped the modern engagement ring more than any design movement before it: in 1947, De Beers launched "A Diamond Is Forever." Before the war, only around one in ten American engagement rings contained a diamond at all; within a generation, the single diamond solitaire had become close to compulsory.

The "tradition" most people assume stretches back centuries is, in large part, a mid-twentieth-century marketing achievement — as is the language we still grade diamonds by: the "4 Cs" (cut, colour, clarity, carat), formalised by the GIA in 1939, are genuinely useful, and also, not coincidentally, a framework that made diamonds easier to sell.

It took a princess to properly reopen the door. When Lady Diana Spencer chose a 12-carat oval sapphire in 1981, she broke thirty years of diamond-only convention almost single-handedly, and the design has been reproduced ever since, not least when Prince William proposed to Catherine Middleton with the very same ring in 2010.

Her choice also helped return sapphire-and-diamond combinations to wider attention. The familiar arrangement of a coloured centre stone surrounded by diamonds remains closely associated with the sapphire diamond cluster ring, offering a distinctive alternative to the conventional all-diamond design.

Blacklock had made its own break from convention a decade earlier. In the 1990s, Ralph Blacklock pioneered tension setting in a collection — suspending a stone between two arms of metal under pressure, with no claws or bezel in sight, letting light hit the diamond from angles a traditional setting blocks.

It sat within a wider minimalist turn in design that decade, a reaction against heavier, more ornate maximalist 1980s fine jewellery — and a fair example of the instinct running through this history: every generation decides the "correct" way is worth questioning.

Today’s engagement ring market looks less like one dominant style and more like the varied jewellery culture Blacklock was founded into. Toi et moi rings, a two-stone format with Georgian and Napoleonic roots, are back in demand. Antique cuts are sought after in their own right, and centre stones are moving well beyond the classic white diamond. Fancy coloured diamonds have become one of the most interesting choices, and the mid-century grading system works in their favour. The D–Z scale ranks white diamonds by how little colour they have. A fancy coloured stone sits outside that scale entirely and is graded on the strength and beauty of the colour it does have.

Champagne diamonds, in honeyed tones from pale straw to rich cognac, offer real rarity at a price that often allows a larger centre stone than an equivalent white diamond. They bring warmth and individuality while keeping the enduring character of a diamond. That idea is built into our current collection as a champagne diamond three-stone ring. The trilogy reads past, present and future, set in a stone most of the trade spent the 20th century teaching people to overlook.

The Thread Through It All

Two centuries of engagement rings don’t trace a straight line toward “better.” They trace a cycle. Sentiment gives way to technical bravado, scarcity interrupts, a single “correct” standard is marketed, and then individual taste reasserts itself. We’re in one of those periods of reassertion now. Blacklock has traded through every cycle since 1832, from Robert March Blacklock’s first counter at Blacklock Fancy Goods to Ralph Blacklock’s tension-set diamonds. Force, Hawthorn and Cove are where that instinct has landed today: Deco geometry, a modern Georgian cluster and the softer lines of Art Nouveau. If any of them draws you in, or a champagne diamond nobody else on the high street is offering, we’d love to help you find or design the ring that’s actually yours.