Butterfly Effect Ring

Every wing on this ring is mounted on its own spring. Beneath the setting, fine coiled wire carries each of the four stones, so that they lift and settle with the movement of the hand — a gentle, continuous tremble rather than a swing. The stones are therefore never quite still, and light enters them from a fresh angle with every gesture.

This is en tremblant, an eighteenth-century technique made for the trembling flower brooches of the period, and it survives today in very few hands. The tension has to be judged exactly: enough to hold the stone true, fine enough to let it answer to the smallest movement. That judgement is the whole of this ring, and it is why the butterfly reads as alive.

The stones arrived as wings already. A marquise is pointed at both ends and long through the middle, which is the geometry of a forewing; a pear is broad at one end and tapered at the other, which is the hindwing. Two marquise diamonds above, two pear tsavorites below — and Eve has cut nothing into a wing shape, because the cuts were wing shapes to begin with.

The tsavorites run to 4.04 carats across two pears. Tsavorite is a green garnet found in a narrow band of Kenya and Tanzania, discovered only in the 1960s and never since found in quantity: a higher refractive index than emerald, no oil, nothing to fill, and a green with real depth to it. The rough comes out of the ground small, which makes matched pears of this size the element of the ring that could never simply be reordered.

Between the wings, the body is yellow gold — a round diamond at the thorax, a graduated line of smaller rounds down the abdomen, and two antennae curling up from the head, each finished with a bezelled diamond. Diamond totals 0.88 carats.

The four wings are set at different heights, the upper pair raised and swept back, the lower pair forward and low, so the planes take light at four different angles before the springs move them at all. Yellow gold arms carry each wing out from the body and continue round to form the shank: the structure that holds the butterfly together is the ring itself.

A table of 17 by 14 millimetres, US size 8, in 18-karat yellow gold.

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