Congratulations to Selena Gomez, who is preparing to wed one of the “sexiest men alive”, according to People magazine. The musician and actor announced her engagement to Benny Blanco with a requisite Instagram carousel, featuring a manicured hand, a bucolic picnic set-up littered with Taco Bell detritus and champagne bottles, and a grin so large it could have been a Wilhelm scream. “Forever begins now,” read the caption. Blanco responded in the comments, “Hey wait… That’s my wife.”
The ring features a marquise-shaped diamond stone – perhaps a subtle nod to “Good For You”, in which Gomez describes herself as a “marquise diamond” that could “even make that Tiffany jealous” – set on pavé shoulders. It’s estimated to be worth £200,000 and is a rare classic of the genre. Jackie Kennedy received a 40-carat marquise-cut diamond ring known as the “Lesotho III” when she married Aristotle Onassis in 1968, and David Beckham proposed to Victoria with a three-carat marquise in 1998, while Jennifer Lopez’s first engagement ring from Ben Affleck was accented with a six-carat marquise in 2002.
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Its origins date back to 18th-century Paris when King Louis XV commissioned his court jeweller to create a diamond that resembled the smile of his official chief mistress – the Marchioness (and later Marquise) de Pompadour – who was known to have a fondness for truffle soup, champagne and porcelain. Their relationship lasted from 1745 to 1751, at which point she relocated from a secret apartment in Versailles to a ground-floor residence, where she remained a trusted confidante, a sort of proto-multi-hyphenate busying herself with a wide-spanning patronage of the arts. Pompadour died of tuberculosis in 1764 and therefore passed too soon to experience the Dionysian thrill of eating tacos on a blanket.
