As the “Official Supplier to the Principality”, Van Cleef & Arpels endowed Princess Charlene with Ocean, a stunning set of jewellery, for her fairytale-like wedding last month. The newly-minted princess donned the Ocean necklace to Bal de la Croix Rouge on August 5, her first official appearance since the wedding.
The aesthetics of Ocean harkens back to Princess Charlene’s former days as a competitive swimmer (she was Charlene Lynette Wittstock back then). While the asymmetrical circles mimic the sea’s wavy patterns, the frothy stream of diamonds are meant to symbolize a cascading range of ripples. Encrusted with 883 round-cut diamonds and 10 pear-cut diamonds, of 44 and four carats respectively, both the tiara and necklace are topped with a dazzling 4.1 carat-cut diamond. The Ocean theme is reinforced by the 359 found-cut sapphires, which – with their three graduating hues of colors – evoke, in the words of president and CEO Stanislas de Quercize, “the world’s different seas, from the waters of the coast of Monaco to the ocean around South Africa”.
