Best Diamonds in Film & TV 2026: Iconic Jewelry Moments

Some of the best jewelry storytelling this year didn’t happen on a red carpet. It happened mid-scene in a Christie’s auction on Hulu’s comedy/drama series All’s Fair, as part of proposal in FX’s Love Story and with a tiara copied stitch for stitch from an empress’s portrait on HMO Max drama The Gilded Age.

Every one of these moments has a real story behind it that rarely makes it past the end credits: a designer who spent months negotiating with a jeweler, or a woman from 1895 whose actual life became the plot of a Sunday night drama. We went looking for those stories on Euphoria, Emily in Paris, and a handful of other shows that had us pausing mid-episode. Here’s what we found once we looked past the sparkle.

Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette

In the fifth episode of FX’s Love Story, titled “Battery Park,” John F. Kennedy Jr. proposes to Carolyn Bessette with a platinum eternity band set with alternating oval-shaped diamonds (opens in a new window) and blue sapphires. According to reporting on the real relationship, Kennedy commissioned the piece from Maurice Tempelsman, Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s longtime partner, specifically so it would echo the ring Jackie herself called her swimming ring.

The show’s fashion consultant, Sunita Kumar Nair, spent months studying Bessette’s real approach to style before advising on her wardrobe and describes a woman who let her clothes and jewelry do quiet work rather than loud. “She allowed [the silhouette] to speak, as opposed to over-accessorizing or embellishing anything,” Nair says.

Costume designer Rudy Mance echoes the approach in his styling of the characters: “Nothing should ever be too, too precious. Kind of like the two of them, nothing should ever be trying too hard.” The result on screen is not a jewelry showpiece but rather a small, private decision between two people who spent their whole relationship trying to avoid the spotlight.

Scene-of-actress-Carolyn-Basette-and-her-engagement-ring — Left: Sarah Pidgeon wearing the engagement ring in *Love Story*. Credit: *Disney Press* Right: JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy wearing her engagement ring in March 1996.

Carolyn-besset-kennedy — Left: Sarah Pidgeon wearing the engagement ring in *Love Story*. Credit: *Disney Press* Right: JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy wearing her engagement ring in March 1996.

Why we love it: the quiet, wearable band is what an engagement ring looks like when it’s picked to match a person instead of a trend or convention.

Get the look

Aucoin Ring — 14K White Gold Sapphire Diamond Wedding Ring by Aucoin Hart Jewelers

Lionheart Stackable Rings — 14K White Gold Sapphire Diamond Wedding Ring by Aucoin Hart Jewelers

Meet the author

Bianca Hartel is the editor of A Diamond is Forever. She is a qualified journalist and former magazine editor who has spent a decade shaping how people think about fashion, celebrity culture and luxury living.

All’s Fair

The costumes in All’s Fair were always going to draw attention, given the star-studded cast, but it’s the Christie’s auction scene in the second episode that turns jewelry into the actual engine of the plot.

A divorcing socialite, played by Judith Light, is set to lose nearly everything in the split except the natural diamond (opens in a new window) jewelry her ex-husband gifted her over the years, which her lawyer discovers is legally hers. Costume designer Paula Bradley knew from early on how much weight the scene would carry. “We knew that this scene in particular needed to be the best of the best,” she says, describing months of work with houses including Tiffany & Co. and Verdura to source the pieces.

Kim Kardashian’s character, meanwhile, wears Pasquale Bruni’s Goddess Garden collier and Heart to Earth pieces throughout the series, chosen, according to the house’s creative director Eugenia Bruni, to reflect “a bold and intentional femininity, strength expressed through softness.”

Why we love it: diamonds show up everywhere in this show, in a courtroom, at a Christie’s auction, on the daily, and they’re never just background sparkle.

Get the look

Pasqual Earth Earrings — Heart to Earth Earrings by Pasquale Bruni

Pasqual Garden Collier — Heart to Earth Earrings by Pasquale Bruni

Euphoria

Cassie and Nate’s wedding, which unfolds across the third episode of Euphoria season three, is engineered for maximum spectacle. There’s a Jackson Wiederhoeft gown with a 16-foot train, an ice sculpture and 25 000 real flowers. But the real showstopper is without a doubt the jewelry. Sydney Sweeney wears waterfall Cartier Lignes Essentielles earrings with three rows of dangling round brilliant-cut diamonds (opens in a new window), a matching three-row diamond necklace, and her engagement ring, a round-cut centre gem flanked by two pear-shaped diamonds on a platinum band. Costume designer Natasha Newman-Thomas didn’t downplay the scale of what Cartier lent the production. “Cartier provided half a million dollars’ worth of diamonds,” she said on the show’s after-show. In a fictional wedding this deliberately chaotic, the diamonds still managed steal the scene.

Why we love it: we came for the drama and we stayed for the diamonds. Half a million dollars of Cartier is not something you see on television every day.

Get the look

Cartier Necklace — Lignes Essentielles necklace, brilliant-cut diamonds by Cartier

Cartier Ring — Lignes Essentielles necklace, brilliant-cut diamonds by Cartier

The Buccaneers

The premise of The Buccaneers, (young American heiresses crossing the Atlantic to trade their fortunes for British titles) isn’t fiction. It’s drawn from a documented historical phenomenon known as the “Dollar Princesses,” and one of the real women at the center of it, Consuelo Yznaga, directly inspired Edith Wharton’s original, unfinished novel. Yznaga’s own goddaughter and namesake later commissioned a Cartier diamond tiara in 1903, now on permanent display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Between the 1870 and the 1914, nearly 102 American heiresses married into the British aristocracy this way, bringing fortunes into aristocratic estates that badly needed it.

Tiara Image CREDIT Apple TV Press — In The Buccaneers, diamond tiaras, drop earrings and statement necklaces mark the young heiresses as new money entering old society. The jewelry is as much a part of the story as the titles they crossed the Atlantic to claim.
Credit: *Apple TV Press*

Why we love it: the show’s whole plot runs on something real, diamonds were literally the currency these women were trading in and knowing that changes how you watch every ballroom scene.

Get the look

Pluie De Cartier Necklace — Pluie de Cartier necklace, diamonds by Cartier

Razny Earrings — Pluie de Cartier necklace, diamonds by Cartier

Emily in Paris

Costume designer Marylin Fitoussi will be the first to admit that diamonds weren’t her area of expertise when she began working on Emily in Paris. “When I started to understand, to see the power of an accessory, of this tool, contemporary or vintage, it was another world,” she says. By season five, she describes something close to a rule: “Every piece of jewelry for every character has a meaning.” This season leans heavily on the Ukrainian house Guzema Fine Jewellery, whose diamond Trio Flat Ring, Petal Flat Ring and delicate Flats Choker appear across nine separate scenes, alongside a bespoke silver and black diamond ear cuff that Fitoussi designed herself, molded from a 3D scan of Lily Collins’s own ear.

Why we love it: every piece has a reason for being there, which feels like watching the character grow up alongside the wardrobe.

Get the look

Petal Flat Ring Guzema — Petal Flat Ring by Guzema

Guzema Diamond Choker — Petal Flat Ring by Guzema

The Gilded Age

Gladys Russell’s entire storyline in The Gilded Age is drawn directly from the real life of Consuelo Vanderbilt. In 1895, Consuelo’s father gave her a Boucheron tiara set with large pear-shaped diamonds (opens in a new window) as a wedding gift ahead of her marriage to the Duke of Marlborough. The show’s own costume jewelry leans theatrical rather than strictly accurate, but the emotional truth underneath the show holds up. As one jewelry executive told WWD of the era’s real diamonds, “They weren’t just a girl’s best friend. They were her values, her status, her armor,” which is exactly the scrutiny Gladys faces on screen when Lady Sarah reprimands her for wearing diamond stars instead of a tiara.

Why we love it: Bertha’s tiara borrows straight from a real Cartier piece made for Queen Alexandra, and Gladys’s scandalous hair stars are lifted from an actual Austrian empress’s portrait. The show isn’t just dressing its characters in diamonds, it’s dressing them in real royal history.

Get the look

Platinum-Diamond-Trois-Etoiles-Clip-by-Belperron-via-Fred-Leighton — Platinum Diamond Trois Étoiles Clip by Belperron via Fred Leighton

And Just Like That…

Fans of the show’s original iteration will remember the era-defining necklace that became synonymous with the lead character: a simple gold nameplate reading “Carrie,” with a single diamond dotting the i. Costume designer Patricia Field pulled the idea straight from the street style she saw around her own SoHo boutique in the late 1990s. The necklace goes missing in the Sex and the City finale, when Carrie moves to Paris with her Russian artist love interest, Aleksandr Petrovsky, who offers to replace it with a line that undersells its own sentiment: “I know this is not the Carrie necklace, but it’s a necklace for Carrie.” Minutes later, she finds the original in a hole in her vintage Dior bag. It’s back on her neck in the reboot, exactly where it belongs.

Carrie-wearing-her-iconic-Carrie-nameplate-necklace — Credit: *Getty Images*

Image 8 Carrie Wearing Her Iconic Carrie Nameplate Necklace Older Carrie CREDIT Warner Bros Discovery Press — Credit: *Getty Images*

Why we love it: it’s proof that the most enduring piece in a diamond jewelry (opens in a new window) collection doesn’t have to be the flashiest one.