Kira Kirby wore Effie Jewellery, the New York house: round brilliants, somewhere between three and four carats, at the ear and set in almost nothing. Round brilliants have spent several seasons being quietly overtaken by elongated cuts. At this size it needs no help from a halo or a second stone, and it doesn't get any.
"Women who already love jewellery don't scale it down for the wedding. They scale everything else down around it."
Three to four carats, round, at the ear. The cut everyone else stopped choosing.
Scale is easy to justify in daylight on a staircase. The real test comes later, when the room goes down and the only light in the frame is whatever the stones can find. Small ones vanish at that point. Large ones keep working, which is the entire practical argument for buying them — not the photographs from the ceremony, but the four hours after it.
Hair worn down does two things at once. It softens the span from jaw to collarbone, and it covers the ear completely. Swept up, the ear becomes the most exposed surface in the entire look, which is why the updo is the decision everything else depends on. A round diamond of this size against a bare ear reads from the back of a room. Worn under hair it may as well not be there.
Bridal jewellery has spent a long time being treated as its own category: pieces bought for a single day, in a register the wearer would never otherwise choose, retired to a box immediately afterwards. What Kira did instead is the obvious thing almost nobody does. She wore what she actually likes, at the scale she actually likes it, on the day it counted most. The dress is worn once. The venue is booked for eight hours. The diamonds are the only part of the day that get worn again on a Tuesday.
