Diamonds, Engagement Rings & Diamond Jewelry in popular culture

Paris Hilton and Benji Madden can’t fight off engagement rumors much longer.  The girl who made ‘famous for being famous’ a job and turned “celebutante” into a word seems ready to settle down with her rocker boyfriend of 10 months, Benji Madden.

The rumors began after only 2 ½ months into their courtship, when the Paris was seen showing off a diamond-encrusted ring bearing the initials “BM”, a most unfortunate set of initials to have to wear at all.  Madden, too, was seen sporting his own diamond-encrusted “PH” ring.  Despite Paris Hilton’s checkered relationship history, it seems that it was too early even for her to promise herself forever (for now) to Benji.  In the past, she was engaged to model Jason Shaw, tattooed “Nick” on her behind while dating Backstreet Boy Nick Carter, and the poor thing later had to request a smaller diamond from shipping heir Paris Latsis because the first of the engagement rings he bought for her was too heavy and it “made her hand hurt”.  None of these men ever got even close to putting a wedding ring on her finger, but her collection of engagement rings grew and grew.

Things appear to be different with Benji Madden, the brother and bandmate of Joel Madden, who is married to Paris’s former best friend and co-star on “The Simple Life”, Nicole Richie, who is a celebutante in her own right.  Although the relationship between these two appears to need its own flow chart, the couple remains solid, and exchanging wedding rings actually might be in their future.  On “Late Night with David Letterman” in May, Paris gushed about her boyfriend and announced her intention to marry him.  She said: “We want to stay together forever”. And she probably really believes that.

At one time, Nicole Ritchie was known as Paris Hilton’s sidekick.  Suddenly, it was Nicole who was skinny and beautiful and photographed all over the place.  When she got endless press for her pregnancy and marriage, Paris took note and not only jumped on the “Serious Relationship” bandwagon, but also the Madden bandwagon (tour bus?) as well.  Lucky for Nicole there was another Madden brother available.

In a recent KIIS-FM radio interview, Ryan Seacrest commented that heiress was wearing a new ring on “a significant finger”.  Paris giggled like a 4 year-old and, without specifically denying that it is an engagement ring, said that, when Madden gave it to her, he told her: “just that he really loves me”.

Ah, young love.  Once again, Paris has found her One True Soul Mate. I’m sure the wedding of Benji Madden and Paris Hilton, should they ever have one, will be her next big role on her next very-own hit reality tv show.

In a move the world has been expecting since they married in 2000, Madonna and Guy Ritchie are turning in their wedding rings and looking to improve on last year’s model, finally publicly announcing their plans to divorce.  Guy Ritchie, 40, proposed to Madonna with an Edwardian 3-stone diamond engagement ring, thus beginning a Hollywood trend of 3-stone engagements rings as the only jewelry choice for all the celebrities, including Sharon Stone, Toni Braxton and Keri Russell.  Madonna, known to be a trend-setter since she first donned lace leggings and a “boy toy” necklace in the 1980s, accepted his proposal and they married in an outrageously lavish wedding in which she wore a diamond tiara and he, a kilt.

Both Madonna and Guy seem to be trading up in their new relationships.  Ritchie has been seen checking into the same hotel as Kelly Reilly, 31, who stars in his new project “Sherlock Holmes”, although he clearly has a few homes to go to in England.  Madonna seemed to move from one kind of diamond to another, amid rumors of an affair with New York Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez, 33. He was seen arriving at her Central Park West Apartment on several different nights and became an avid follower of Kabbalah, Madonna’s adopted religion.

It was well-known that the religion issue was a bone of contention between Madonna and Guy, as she was adamant about her children following Kabbalah, although Ritchie himself, was not observant.  It also appeared that her “Kabbalah Anger Management Class” didn’t really work, after she slapped Ritchie and complained that she “…should have married someone like [her]: strong, hot-blooded, intelligent, ambitious, and spiritual”, according to US Magazine.  She was also heard on stage in New York referring to her soon-to-be-ex  as “emotionally retarded”.  If she was looking for hot-blooded and impassioned, one might ask why she married a Brit in the first place.

Guy Ritchie took a few swings back, so to speak, revealing that Madonna won’t allow her children to watch television or eat anything that isn’t macrobiotic, and that she sleeps every night slathered in $1,000 per jar skin cream and a plastic bodysuit to prevent aging.  According to “The Guardian”, she also would write sex into her schedule, around her 4-hour workouts and dragging the kids to endless Kabbalah classes.  This is probably when the romance died for Ritchie.

Prior to her latest ill-fated marriage, Madonna had been a sort-of Anglophile for years, incorporating a ridiculous cockney accent into her stage shows in the late 1990s, dating a few British men, and becoming friends with other American-Celebrities-Wanting-To-Be-British like Gwyneth Paltrow and actual Brits like Sting and Stella McCartney.  In perhaps her first truly British moment, Madonna, when asked why she was finally admitting to the divorce, told a source that she “…can not live with the pretence any longer”.  At least the spelling was British.

Madonna has reinvented herself once again on the cover of her new album “Hard Candy”, displaying a “knuckleduster”, the 258-diamond equivalent of brass knuckles.  Evidently, she has made garish displays of diamond jewellery popular outside the hip-hop community, combining that $800,000 display with a diamond cross around her neck.  Evidently, diamond knuckledusters and  diamond crosses have become all the rage–all over the world–as a result of Madonna’s influence.   One can only hope that her influence ends there.

Suzanne Gannon

Thank God They’re Both Good-Looking

It seems that the brain-trust that is the Jessica Simpson/Tony Romo pairing is taking it to the next level: wedding rings. From the first time they laid their vacant eyes on each other, these two have been sparking rumors from breakups to marriage to pregnancy to “the Simpson Curse”. Now, they have been seen shopping in Dallas, looking at engagement rings.

The Prodigal Couple

Jessica Simpson began as a pop artist and gained fame for her pledge to remain a virgin until her wedding night. Evidently, she meant her first wedding night. In 2002, when Nick Lachey, formerly of the boy band 98 degrees, put a wedding ring on her finger, he was the more famous of the two. When their MTV reality show “Newlyweds” premiered, it became the vehicle through which we all came to know exactly how smart our little Jessica is. Her most famous moment was when she asked Nick, as they sat eating tuna salad, if it was really chicken because the brand was (as she called it) ‘Chicken by the Sea’. This ignorance scored her a cover on “Rolling Stone” magazine and catapulted her to fame.

Jessica Simpson and Tony Romo finally got together in November of 2007, after exchanging emails and talking on the phone. Simpson wanted to see if he was “good with words”, probably realizing that one of them should be. She has said of Tony that he is “her future husband”, and has been planning on getting an engagement ring out of him since she found out she was his biggest celebrity crush. She says that she is “wearing her number 9 jersey proud”, and at the Texas State Far on October 17, Jessica told the huge crowd, before playing a new single from her country album: “This is a song I wrote about a certain someone who throws that football really good”. Tony responded in kind by calling her crossover to country music “the cutest thing”.

As the two are now shacking up in Romo’s Arlington, Texas home, they must be planning on exchanging wedding rings soon. Joe Simpson, Jessica’s creepy father who blamed her “Double-Ds”—his subtle way of referring to her unusually large breasts—for her inability to begin a career in country music as a teen, still makes most of her decisions. Being a religious man, he absolutely would not approve of his little angel living with a man if that man didn’t put an engagement ring on Jessica’s finger first.

Certainly, Jessica and Tony were only looking at engagement rings while in Dallas. They were, after all, at a department store. But the Chicago Sun-Times has reported that the two are planning a winter wedding, making sure that it will not interfere in any way with the regular football season or, should the Cowboys make it, the Superbowl. With this time crunch, one can assume that, if Jessica Simpson doesn’t already have her engagement ring, she will soon.

When Tony Romo and Jessica Simpson marry, each putting an undoubtedly unique and beautiful wedding ring on the—which hand is it again?—finger of the other, they will likely exchange vows in which Jessica will promise to never again wear the pink jersey to Cowboys games, and Tony will promise to love and cherish each last breath of Jessica’s legendary intestinal gas.

And we can all look forward to their inevitable MTV reality show.