Today, the Duchess of Edinburgh celebrates her milestone 60th birthday. In her honor, we’re spending some time today with one of her newest suites of jewelry, a demi-parure set with diamonds and royal blue sapphires.
During the recent state visit from the Emir of Qatar to Britain, the Duchess of Edinburgh was one of the guests in attendance at the grand state banquet at Buckingham Palace. She arrived for the dinner wearing an elegant gown, decorations, and jewels, including a necklace, earrings, and bracelet set with diamonds and sapphires.
The suite of diamond and sapphire jewelry comes from Graff, the British jewelry company founded in London in 1960 by Laurence Graff. The pieces are from the firm’s “Nuage” collection, which made its debut around a decade ago. As the name suggests, each piece features cloud-like design motifs. You’ll note the scrolling cloud designs included in the stud portion of the chandelier earrings.
The Nuage necklace worn by Sophie also features cloud-inspired imagery. In a review of the collection for The Jewellery Editor, Ase Anderson describes the necklace as “a free-form design that captures the buoyancy and lightness of clouds in pavé diamonds scattered with bursting sapphire blooms.”
The same design motifs used in the necklace and earrings are also repeated in the matching bracelet from the Nuage suite, which is once again set with bright blue sapphires and diamonds.
Sophie has been wearing pieces from the Nuage sapphire set since at least 2022. She wore the earrings that June during an official Platinum Jubilee visit to Gibraltar, and she brought them out again in December 2022 for the Royal Variety Performance.
On that occasion, she also wore a sapphire and diamond ring on her right hand. The ring may also be part of the same suite of sapphire and diamond jewelry.
We saw Sophie wearing her sapphires again in May 2023 when she arrived at Westminster Abbey for the coronation of her brother-in-law, King Charles III, and sister-in-law, Queen Camilla. This time, she wore both the earrings and the bracelet from the set with her gown and robes.
And in December 2024, the newly-minted Duchess of Edinburgh wore the complete demi-parure—necklace, earrings, and bracelet—with her convertible aquamarine and diamond tiara for the Qatari state banquet at Buckingham Palace. Sophie has become more and more important as a working member of the royal family as the years have gone by and the family has slimmed down, and it’s wonderful to see her bringing out more jewels from her growing personal collection as she attends gala events.
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