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The World’s Most Famous Engagement Rings

It is more than five centuries since Archduke Maximilian I of Austria gave the first recorded diamond engagement ring to Mary of Burgundy, and since then rich and famous men have indulged their fiancés with some quite incredible gifts.

It’s ironic that perhaps the most famous ‘engagement ring’ in history may not actually have commemorated an engagement at all. There has been a deluge of speculation recently about the ring given by Dodi Fayed to Princess Diana. Though Mohammed Al-Fayed insists that the ring proves that Diana had agreed to marry his son, sources close to the Princess claim it was merely a ‘friendship ring’.

Princess Diana’s ‘other’ engagement ring, given to her by Prince Charles, caused a stir at the time. This was made not with a classic central diamond, but with an eighteen-carat blue oval sapphire, circled by fourteen diamonds. Twenty years later, Prince Charles would buy another amazing engagement ring, an art deco antique-style platinum emerald ring with baguette diamonds, which he presented to Camilla Parker Bowles.

Prince Charles’s mother, Queen Elizabeth II, was given an engagement ring by Prince Phillip made out of diamonds from Phillip’s mother's tiara. When Prince Rainier of Monaco proposed to Grace Kelly, he presented her with a twelve-carat emerald-cut diamond.

Hollywood royalty have also traditionally bought lavish and extravagant engagement rings. When Elvis Presley proposed to his girlfriend Priscilla, the central diamond in her ring weighed three

Michael Douglas marked his engagement to Catherine Zeta-Jones' with a ten-carat antique marquise diamond, valued at nearly one million pounds, while Ben Affleck bought Jennifer Lopez a six-carat radiant cut pink diamond. However, both were smaller than the fifteen-carat diamond given to Paris Hilton by her billionaire boyfriend Paris Latsis. And as if one ring wasn’t enough, he also handed her a twenty-four carat canary diamond.