Feather Engagement Ring Designs

This article is part of our What's Your Inspiration series, where we explore the personal touches and sources of inspiration our customers bring to their engagement rings.

Birds of a feather

There's something about the fluid and delicate nature of a feather that makes it perfect for engagement ring designs. And our customers have shown us that there's a broad range of meaningful symbolism the feather can carry, from the literal reference for bird-lovers to its role as a quill for writers or readers or Harry Potter fans. We've collected five of our favorites to share the stories of these unique designs!

1

Our first bit of feather inspiration is, perhaps, the most unusual — its a feather from the anime series "Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle." Specifically, a character named Sakura (which means cherry blossom) and the symbolic feathers that play a role in her story. For this manga-loving couple, including this beautiful symbol makes the ring incredibly personal. So our designer combined the feather with a cherry blossom (a reference to the character's name) to create this sweeping, asymmetrical design with a pink tourmaline at the center and aquamarine highlighting the flower.

2

We love the wonderful places our customers look for inspiration when designing a ring. How about the recipient's name? "One of her favorite things are feathers," our customer explained, "which in dutch are the first four letters of her name." What a perfect way to make the ring more meaningful. So we sketched a few delicate, feather-y designs that arrived at this tiara-inspired look, with feathers curling up to form a frame around an oval cut diamond center stone. As we moved from the initial sketches to a 3D model for the ring, we realized that we would get the perfect delicate look by simplifying and editing out some of the initial swoops of accent gems, letting the delicate curls of rose gold speak for themselves. Sometimes less is more, and this is one of those cases where the more delicate result is perfect.

3

In this customer's words: "she loves peacock feathers and has incorporated them into her company logo. It symbolizes immortality and protects those wearing them. Something like that would really set her ring apart from others and make it more personal." Just the sort of detail we love! What's more beautiful and distinctive than a peacock feather? We kept the look understated, using peacock feathers as one half of a delicate split shank that frames the perfect pear cut emerald, with small clusters of diamonds on each side to bring the sparkle.

4

This customer's now-fiancée is a writer, a lover of books, and a big Harry Potter fan, so a quill is a perfect symbol for her. So we designed a lotus ring. At least, a perfect, contemporary lotus ring is what you'll see at first glance. But a closer look reveals that there are quills all along the twisting band. It was the customer's idea to add a bit of color with aquamarine accents, which add a perfect blushing blue to the rose gold flower petals.

5

This last one takes the most straightforward path to its feather inspiration: feathers are beautiful, why not use them to detail the band? So we designed an elegant look where the feathers curve in opposite directions form a bypass setting around a turquoise center stone. Small diamonds accent the beautiful blue of the center stone.