Piaget’s Desert Adventures

Fancy Vivid Yellow diamonds are so rare that it took Piaget’s head gemologist a year to gather all the stones needed for the four-piece Golden Hour set comprising a necklace, a pair of earrings, a cocktail ring and a dazzling watch. It then took the Piaget’s atelier another 450 hours to create its star piece: a fully articulated necklace set with a 6.63-carat, cushion-cut Fancy Vivid Yellow diamond, 76 marquise-cut yellow diamonds weighting 19.88 carats and another 106 marquise-cut diamonds, weighing 23.88 carats.

“As marquise-cut yellow diamonds are very rare, each one had to be especially cut for this creation to perfectly fit the dedicated spaces and design,” a Piaget spokesperson said during the presentation at its Parisian flagship boutique on Rue de la Paix.

According to legends, the marquise cut (an elliptical shape with pointed ends) was created at the request of King Louis XV, who commissioned his court jewellers to fashion jewellery with diamonds shaped like the lips of his mistress, the Marquise de Pompadour. The cut, which requires the cutter to start with a large stone and involves a considerable loss of material to achieve the desired sparkle, has become one of Piaget’s signature styles and is used in the Golden Hour necklace to bring to life the glow of sun rays on desert sand, when daylight is at its redder and softer right before the sun set or rise - the so-called “golden hour” in photography.

Sunlight, as a source of joy and energy, has been a recurrent theme in recent Piaget collections. For Golden Oasis, the jeweller set out to capture the warm hues of the sunlight dancing on golden dunes and rock canyons with a range of yellow diamonds, deep red rubies, and pink and red spinels. Of particular note is the aptly named Hypnotic Light necklace that brings together 13 extremely rare pear-shaped spinels (weighing 17.45 carats) and 68 pink spinel beads (weighing 66.60 carats) with round-cut pink sapphires and brilliant-cut diamonds. According to Piaget, it took more than eight months to source all the pear-shaped spinels, whose unusual baby pink colour can only be found in stones from a mine in the north of Vietnam.

Beside the sun-soaked scenery of rocks and shifting sands, the jeweller also brought to mind water pools and waterfalls, maybe hidden within the curves of a desert canyon, using marquise-cut sapphires to mimic the flow of water. Amongst the pieces on this theme is the Blue Waterfall watch presents a bezel decorated with marquise sapphires and a white-gold bracelet hand-engraved with Palace Decor – guilloche work that forms irregular streaks resembling the fibres of raw silk but here suggests the jagged rocks of a lagoon. Another Palace Décor bracelet mimics the sandstone walls of a desert canyon while its black opal watch dial (a medley of yellow, green and blue hues) offers a perfect deep-water oasis.

Some pieces in the new collection also include suggestions of the vegetation found around oases with the use marquise-cut emeralds bringing to mind the lush leaves of palm trees or the golden palm tree necklace set with 392 brilliant-cut diamonds cut.