The Journey to My Engagement Ring

How we reset an heirloom to make it feel like ✨me✨!

I’ve had my engagement ring since I was 17 years old. Or, rather, when I was 17 the sweetest, best, matriarch of our family- my grandma- died, and left her ring to her only daughter (my mom), who set it aside for her only daughter (me).

My grandma was a glamorous figure who left so many beautiful pieces to the women in my family. Whenever I admire a piece of my aunts’ or mom’s or cousins,’ the answer is always the same: it belonged to Grandma. It felt so lucky, and so like her, to know that I had one more expertly-selected gift coming down the pike: her three-stone engagement ring from her 50+ year marriage to my grandpa, the stones a gift to them from my grandfather’s own grandmother. Cut to 16 years later when Jesse and I started talking about the process of actually *getting engaged* ourselves, and I got to say, oh wow do I have a surprise for YOU!

A beautiful thing about this entire engagement/marriage experience is that you can actually do things exactly the way you want to (thinking less about family + financial situations here and more about societal + gendered pressures, etc). There are actually no rules! For our process, I knew that I didn’t want to be surprised by a ring setting- I loooove the process of finding the perfect fit too much, as you can imagine, and wanted to build a connection with the piece I’d be wearing on my finger every day right from the start. Plus, my connection with my grandma was so intense and special, and I knew it would be emotional for me to change something that had been hers until the end, even if it’s what she would have wanted.

My grandma’s ring, set in white gold.

If I had been starting from scratch, lord knows what direction I would have headed in. I have a few ideas, but as it was I was looking for a new three stone, or “trilogy,” setting. I knew I wanted yellow gold and, since we were working with more glam than I was used to, I wanted the stones to feel “cozy” with a more organic, chunky base than something stark and dainty. I had no idea about any jewelers or retailers that I wanted to look into- and I love to do my research- so I started angling my tiktok algorithm towards jewelers who reset heirloom pieces, antique jewelry vendors, and funky settings in general.

I also posted on the verrrry helpful and active chats of two substacks I love,

Gumshoe

and

À La Carte

, asking if anyone in those design-oriented communities had recommendations for a jeweler (BOY DID THEY). Then I opened one hundred tabs of jewelers’ websites (a dream), and just started digging. Not seeing what I wanted right away, I started pulling images of rings that looked nothing like mine, but that had a feeling I was drawn to, just to get started.

1. Vintage garnet wedding band; 2. Ruby signet ring; 3. Pearl ring; 4. Jane Pope diamond cigar band; 5. A picture from pinterest I can’t find a link to, but here’s a similar feeling

Once I felt assured that there were rings out there I did like (after looking through so many pages of ones I did not!), I started to hone in on settings that would likely look a bit more like mine:

I loved how chunky and full these (largely antique) pieces felt, so different than the simpler pieces I was seeing so many of and not resonating with. And then, a jeweler responded to my query in the

À La Carte

chat…

The Lucky 3 by Jonne Amaya

LA-based jeweler Jonne Amaya specializes in repurposing heirlooms, in the kind of chunky gold base I had been dreaming of. She had tons of beautiful settings in her capsule collection, each one made to order, and ONE trilogy setting called The Lucky 3. More like Lucky ME! It was love at first sight.

Jesse and I met with Jonne in person, and knew right away that we had found our guy. She made a wax mockup of the ring so I could see what it looked like on my hand, and I fell in big love with the unique, globby setting. We pulled the trigger before tariffs upped the price of the metal (🙏), and Jesse reintroduced me to my new ring a few weeks later- my grandma’s stones that I’ve known my whole life, in a setting we chose together. It was the perfect surprise.

Sending big love to all of you!

xx, Olivia