The World's Most Expensive Engagement Rings — and Who Gave Them

The most expensive engagement rings in the world belong to a surprisingly short list of women: Mariah Carey's 35-carat diamond from James Packer, reportedly valued around $10 million; Elizabeth Taylor's 33.19-carat Krupp diamond from Richard Burton, which sold for about $8.8 million in 2011; and Grace Kelly's 10.48-carat Cartier emerald cut, which some recent estimates now place near $40 million. Behind each ring sits a story far more interesting than its price tag — proposals in palaces and baseball stadiums, diamonds locked in bank vaults, and more than one ring that outlasted the romance that inspired it. Here are the stories, told honestly, with every figure marked as the estimate it is.

Before the stories, the headline numbers at a glance:

Grace Kelly and the ring that starred in a film

When Prince Rainier III of Monaco travelled to Philadelphia at Christmas 1955 to propose to Grace Kelly, he did not arrive with the ring everyone remembers. His first offering was a Cartier eternity band set with rubies and diamonds — red and white, the colours of the Monegasque flag. It was a thoughtful, almost modest ring for a future princess.

Then Rainier reportedly saw what Hollywood actresses were wearing, and quietly upgraded. The second ring was the one history kept: a 10.48-carat emerald-cut diamond flanked by tapering baguettes, set in platinum by Cartier. Kelly wore it on screen in High Society in 1956 — filming was already under way when the engagement was announced, so her real ring simply played itself. It remains one of the only engagement rings with a film credit. Kept by the Palace of Monaco today, its value is genuinely hard to pin down, but recent estimates reported in the press run to roughly $38–40 million, which would make it arguably the most valuable engagement ring in existence.

Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and the Krupp diamond

No list like this survives without Elizabeth Taylor, and no jewel defined her quite like the Krupp. In 1968 Richard Burton bought the 33.19-carat Asscher-cut diamond at auction for a reported $305,000 or so — at the time, a record price for a diamond ring at auction. Strictly speaking it was not an engagement ring at all; Burton and Taylor were already married, and he gave it to her simply because he could not resist. She wore it almost every day for the rest of her life, which is why the world treats it as her ring in every way that matters.

Taylor adored the stone's icy, step-cut geometry and reportedly loved that a diamond once owned by the Krupp industrial family had ended up on the hand of what she cheerfully called a nice Jewish girl. After her death, Christie's sold the renamed Elizabeth Taylor Diamond in December 2011 for about $8.8 million — roughly twenty-eight times what Burton had paid four decades earlier.

Jackie Kennedy Onassis and the diamond in the vault

When Aristotle Onassis proposed to Jacqueline Kennedy in 1968, he did it with a stone that had a passport of its own. The Lesotho III is a 40.42-carat marquise-cut diamond, one of several stones cut by Harry Winston from the 601-carat Lesotho rough — a diamond famously discovered in the mountain kingdom of Lesotho the previous year. Onassis, then one of the richest men alive, gave the largest engagement diamond on this list.

And here is the strange part: Jackie hardly ever wore it. By most accounts the ring spent the majority of her marriage in a bank vault, brought out only a handful of times. When Sotheby's auctioned her estate in 1996, the ring — estimated at around $500,000 to $600,000 — sold for roughly $2.6 million, carried far past its estimate by the sheer gravity of her name. It is a tidy lesson in how fame, not just carat weight, sets the price of a legend's jewellery.

Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian: the Lorraine Schwartz era

If old Hollywood belonged to Cartier and Harry Winston, the modern mega-ring belongs to New York jeweller Lorraine Schwartz. Beyoncé and Jay-Z never announced their engagement — the ring simply appeared around their famously private wedding in April 2008. Schwartz made it: an emerald-cut diamond reported at 18 carats and described as flawless, set on a slim platinum split shank, with a price widely quoted around $5 million. Beyoncé has said she never particularly wanted an enormous ring, and she is rarely photographed wearing it — the diamond mostly stays locked away while she wears a simple band.

In October 2013, Kanye West hired out a San Francisco baseball stadium, filled it with an orchestra, and proposed to Kim Kardashian with another Schwartz creation: a 15-carat cushion-cut diamond, reported to be D colour, flawless and type IIa — the rarest chemical category a diamond can belong to. Those letters matter more than the headlines suggest: colour, clarity and type are exactly the qualities an independent laboratory certifies, whether the stone costs $8 million or $800. (It is the same logic behind an IGI certificate on a lab-grown stone today.) Sadly, the Kardashian story carries a darker footnote — the ring stolen at gunpoint in Paris in 2016 was a second, 20-carat emerald cut West had given her, reportedly worth around $4 million. It has never been recovered.

Mariah Carey and the rings that outlived the romance

The largest reported price on this list belongs to a ring whose engagement never became a marriage. In January 2016, Australian billionaire James Packer proposed to Mariah Carey with a 35-carat diamond widely reported to be worth around $10 million. The engagement ended within the year. Carey kept the ring — reportedly as part of the settlement — and in 2018 her team was reported to have sold it to a Los Angeles jeweller for about $2.1 million, roughly a fifth of its quoted value. Few stories illustrate more neatly the gap between a diamond's headline price and what it actually fetches.

Paris Hilton could sympathise. Her 2005 engagement to Greek shipping heir Paris Latsis came with a diamond reported at 24 carats and valued at as much as $4.7 million — a ring she later admitted was so heavy it was genuinely uncomfortable to wear. The engagement lasted months; the ring, by her own account, was more burden than pleasure. Sometimes the most expensive engagement rings in the world are also the most honest arguments against them.

What the price tags never bought

Read these stories back to back and a pattern emerges. The rings that meant the most — Taylor's daily-worn Krupp, Kelly's film-starring emerald cut — were loved for what they represented, not what they cost. The rings bought purely as spectacle tended to end up in vaults, at auction, or sold at a steep loss. The love was never in the price tag; it was in the giving.

That is worth remembering in 2026, because the mathematics of sparkle has changed completely. A flawless emerald cut of serious size was once the preserve of shipping magnates and film stars; today, lab-grown diamonds — chemically and optically identical to mined stones — have put certified, D-colour brilliance within reach of ordinary couples, and falling lab-grown prices have only widened that door. Every diamond we set at Signora is IGI-certified, with the report number laser-inscribed on the girdle, made to order in our Surat workshops and delivered to the US, UK or Canada with duties prepaid in around two weeks. You will not need a bank vault, a bodyguard or a billionaire. Just someone worth kneeling for — which, as every story above quietly proves, was always the expensive part.