On Monday, Kate Middleton shared the good news that she had finished chemotherapy treatments following her cancer diagnosis earlier this year. The announcement came in the form of a dreamy video showing the princess relaxing with her husband, Prince William, and family at their country home in Norfolk. It also provided a few clues to a recent mystery surrounding Kate’s engagement ring.
In August, when William and Kate appeared in a video celebrating the Olympics with Snoop Dogg, eagle-eyed viewers noticed that she wasn’t wearing her engagement ring, a 12 carat Ceylon sapphire encircled by 14 diamonds. Instead, the Welsh gold wedding band and the white gold and diamond eternity band that she wore on her left hand, as usual, were stacked alongside a different gemstone-encrusted ring, though it was difficult to tell what color the stones were.
At first, some commentators, including jewelry expert Maxwell Stone, suggested that it might be an older piece from the princess’s collection. Early in their relationship, William gave Kate a gold promise ring inset with each of their birthstones, garnet and pearl, and she was first photographed wearing it at her college graduation in 2005. However, Lauren Kiehna of The Court Jeweller—a foremost chronicler of Kate’s baubles, both high and low—noted that the ring’s profile fit in with her other bands, while the garnet promise ring has a rounded face. She deduced that the eternity band set with dark gemstones seen in the Olympics video was likely a new acquisition.
Monday’s video, filmed by director and food influencer Will Warr, shows Kate’s hand from a variety of angles—including prominently, ten seconds in, as she drives a stick-shift—and appears to display, once again, an eternity band in place of her engagement ring. Though the video’s warm, nostalgic tones make it difficult to see exactly what color the stones are, they seem to match her familiar sapphire earrings and the well-known Ceylon sapphire it has, for the moment, replaced.
That ring, famously, once belonged to William’s mother, Princess Diana, and Kate has been wearing it since she and William publicly announced their engagement in December 2010. In the years since, it’s not unusual for Kate to take the engagement ring off for messy or active events, like digging in the dirt with Girl Scouts or rappelling with army cadets. During the pandemic, she often appeared in videos without it. In early 2020, Kate wore only the Welsh gold ring during a trip to the Evelina Children’s Hospital, where she visited patients with immune conditions. Later, her spokesperson told Hello! that she made the choice not to wear her other rings for hygiene reasons.
Fans of the famous 15-stone ring that belonged to the previous Princess of Wales have no reason to fear that it has gone into the vault for good. Kate was wearing that spectacular ring during her appearance at Trooping the Colour in June and at Wimbledon in July.
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