Recently I came across a fascinating article in the New York Times archive from 1912: “The Etiquette of Jewels: The Woman Who Takes Care Not to Wear Them for Mere Garish Display Can Add Much to Her Appearance.” It describes how diamonds and other jewels can enhance a woman’s “natural loveliness.”
It’s interesting to observe the rather ham-handed way that women are portrayed in the article by today’s standards. While the author makes a point that it’s important to pay attention to proportion and harmony when choosing jewels, he also notes how women should be acutely aware of their imperfections, rather than comfortable with their natural beauty “for where a woman fails to mentally admit her own shortcomings, she is more apt to emphasize them to others.” She instead needs “the calm calculation of a soldier planning a battle, thus intelligently facing the difficulties to be dealt with.”
Women need to wear not necessarily what they like and what gives them the most pleasure, but rather items that are the “most correct” for, and I quote, “her height, the contour of her face, her age, (or rather, to express it in the modern phrasing, her dignity,) the definite proportion of each feature, and her hands and arms.” The article goes on to describe which stones go best with which complexions and hair colors (because heaven forbid, you wouldn’t want to produce “an unpleasing, gypsy likeness.”
While this advice is questionable at best, there is one bit at the end that rings true to me:
The appeal of jewels, however much may be said to the contrary, is not a woman’s vanity, but to her love of the beautiful.
Women must choose diamonds and other jewelry that they interpret as truly beautiful, diamonds that makes them feel alive and truly unique. There is no automatic process to determine the “most correct” diamond for someone; beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
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