Nail art has been all the rage on social media recently, and it turns out there is a counterpart to the world of Marc Jacobs’s decorative talons in jewelry: The nail ring.
Ten years ago, Chloe Azoulay had just had her nails done for a wedding when some of the polish flaked off.
“So I said to myself, ‘I need something to hide it,’” she recalled recently. “It would be beautiful to have some jewelry.”
She and her sister were setting up Asherali, a jewelry brand, at the time. And its first fine jewelry offering was a ring with a small shield that covered the nail, held in place by a small band at the finger’s tip.
“I want a line,” she said of its neat design, “that is harmonious with your hand.”
The brand had been dormant for six years when Ms. Azoulay revived it in 2023, this time working with her best friend, Johanna Mamane. And the original nail ring design — which, Ms. Azoulay said, had been sitting in her closet for three years — was reintroduced in March. It is now available in plain white or rose gold, or with a pavé diamond ring band or pavé diamonds on the nail shield and ring band, with prices from 550 euros to 1,750 euros ($600 to $1,910).
“It’s nice to find new pieces, new parts of the body for jewelry,” she said.
She is not the only one who has thought so. Caroline Pham, who created the ORA-C brand in Montreal in 2015, said that at the height of the pandemic lockdown, while watching videos of people painting their nails, she became obsessed with nail art and the idea of creating jewelry that could be worn in new ways.
In 2021, she designed the Orchis Claw ring, a nail ring in 14-karat gold-plated brass, brass or silver, with a choice of semiprecious stones such as carnelian or sodalite ($230 in gold). “I thought it was like so perfect for a jewelry idea,” she said, waving her fingers and tapping her own ring-covered nails.
While Ms. Pham said she found the rings “to be really comfortable,” she noted that determining the size of a fingertip was much more complex than just using the global standards for ring size. Her answer was to create an open-back ring that, with gentle pressure, would open and close just enough to take it off or to secure it.
Räthel & Wolf, a jewelry brand in Berlin, has used a similar gap in the ring shank for its Gabriel, Renee, Mila, Simone and other designs, each of which sell for less than €250.
Sari Räthel, a founder of the brand, made her first nail ring in 2016 while studying for her master’s degree in jewelry and metal at the Royal College of Art in London. (She and her friend Ricarda Wolf, who formerly designed jewelry and accessories for Cos, established their company the following year.)
Jewelers’ fingernails are usually quite rough from work, Ms. Räthel said. She got the idea for a nail ring, she said, while thinking, “How can you adorn your fingertips with something like it’s basically an impromptu manicure?”
Rather than covering the nail, however, the duo’s signature design highlights it with a metal frame sitting just under the nail tip, “really filling this super intimate gap,” Ms. Räthel said, adding that the design required extensive research as everyone’s nails and nail beds are different lengths.
Jules Kim, who owns the Bijules jewelry brand, based in New York and Milan, has been making nail rings since 2007. Her signature is a distinctive serpent design that winds around the finger tip (Beyoncé wore a pavé diamond version in the video for “Sweet Dreams,” released in 2009).
Ms. Kim, who said her background as a nightlife promoter has often influenced her designs, estimated that she had made more than 100 nail rings with various looks, some of which covered the nail (including thumbs and pinkies) while others played with negative space. In 2007, she copyrighted two versions of the design.
She said she has drawn inspiration from several sources, including Studio 54 and childhood nostalgia. “Maybe I was 5 or 6,” she said, “but I remember getting ready for a singsong chorus thing and I remember painting my nails red with a marker.” Red nails were the basis of her Enailmel cherry-red pinkie nail ring ($3,255).
Nail rings might feel very 2024 (Diesel featured them in its spring collection), but the ancient Egyptians were known for finger — and toe — caps, known as stalls, which were placed on the body before burial.
Angie Marei was familiar with that practice — having seen stalls in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in books — before 2012, when she molded melted wax over a plastic press-on nail to create a textured skulls design for a friend who was doing nail art.
Today, her jewelry business, Marei New York, sells such pieces and does custom orders; she said they typically have been bought as sets of four, to cover all four fingertips. “It’s kind of like a cocktail ring without it being a traditional cocktail ring,” she said.
Jessie Evans, the designer behind the Jessie V E brand and now a nail artist entrepreneur in London, said, “There’s such a crossover of people that love jewelry and also really love to spend time on having their nails done.”
That was, in part, what prompted her this week to introduce Diamonds At Your Fingertips, a collection of jewelry charms, including stars, studs and smiley faces, that were handmade in 18-karat yellow gold with sapphires and diamonds. The charms, each from 65 pounds (about $85) can be applied to nails by a manicurist.
The idea came to her in January, Ms. Evans said. She really enjoyed having her nails done, and whenever she did, she said, “I’d post a picture of my rings on my page and everyone would be like ‘I love your nails.’” And, as a jeweler, she had a desire to add diamonds.
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