Birthday Jewels: Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden

Scandinavian princesses are traditionally given their first tiara on their eighteenth birthdays. Victoria’s first tiara was a small sparkler made of diamonds and sapphires. She wore it frequently at gala events when she was still a teenager, including at the first wedding of Prince Joachim of Denmark and at the celebrations for her father’s 50th birthday. She has since moved on to more substantial tiaras, and this one hasn’t been seen in public since 2007.

In 2000, Victoria began wearing a diamond tiara made of four floral button elements. The piece was apparently assembled in the 1960s from a set of heirloom diamond buttons for the use of the Haga Princesses. Victoria occasionally supplements this tiara with an extra row of diamonds at the base. She has worn this one consistently over the past decade and a half, including important outings at Crown Prince Frederik’s wedding and Queen Margrethe II’s 60th birthday celebrations.

The tiara most closely associated with Victoria is the sunburst fringe tiara that once belonged to Victoria of Baden, who received the tiara as a wedding present in 1881. Crown Princess Victoria has been wearing this diamond sparkler regularly since at least 2001, when she wore it at the wedding of Crown Prince Haakon of Norway. She’s also worn it for her father’s 60th birthday celebrations, the enthronement gala for Prince Albert II of Monaco, and for her engagement portraits.

This one’s sort of cheating — Victoria has worn the family’s modern diamond fringe tiara, but she’s worn it as a necklace. To my knowledge, she’s never sported this one as a tiara in public. As many think the tiara has been given to Princess Madeleine, it seems unlikely that she’ll wear this one again, but she did wear it as a necklace at a charity event at Versailles in 2002.

The larger of the family’s cut steel tiaras has been one of Victoria’s favorites to wear at the annual Nobel Prize gala events. This unusual tiara, which is one of the family’s heirlooms from the Napoleonic era, has no gemstones, but relies on the intricate way that the steel is cut for maximum sparkle. Victoria has been wearing this tiara since about 2004.

Another treasure from imperial France, Victoria wears the necklace-turned-tiara from the family’s amethyst parure fairly frequently. Queen Silvia has noted that the amethysts are especially suited for her daughter’s coloring. Victoria has worn this one to several major royal events, including the wedding of Princess Martha Louise of Norway in 2002 and the recent investiture ceremonies for King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands.

A sister sparkler to the Four Button, Victoria has been wearing the diamond tiara with six button elements for a number of years. The tiara’s diamond rosettes were affixed to the crown of the first Bernadotte king, Carl XIV Johan, at his coronation in 1818. Some have speculated that this tiara was assembled in the twentieth century with the late Princess Lilian in mind. Victoria has primarily worn this one to Nobel banquets and during state visits.

It’s hard to call this a tiara, really, but both Crown Princess Victoria and her sister, Princess Madeleine, have occasionally worn diamond necklaces in their hair as bandeaux for gala events. Here, Victoria has placed a necklace in her hair for the king’s Nobel dinner in 2008.

Victoria debuted a second cut steel tiara, said to come from the same Napoleonic stash as its larger cousin, during the wedding celebrations of Hereditary Grand Duke Guillaume of Luxembourg in 2012. Like the larger version, this tiara has no gemstones, but sparkles because of the way the highly-polished steel is cut. Victoria’s worn this V-shaped tiara several times since.

In 2013, Victoria inherited a diamond laurel wreath tiara from her great-aunt, Princess Lilian. The tiara, which can also be worn as a necklace, came from the collection of Victoria’s great-grandmother, Princess Margaret of Connaught. To honor Lilian, Victoria wore it to the first big royal event following her death: the wedding of Princess Madeleine in June 2013.

Last but not least, Victoria has worn one of the grandest tiaras in the Swedish collection, the pearl and gold Cameo tiara, in public precisely once: on her wedding day in 2010. The tiara features cameos that tell the story of Cupid and Psyche, and it’s one of the family’s traditional bridal diadems. Made at the very start of the nineteenth-century, it’s one of the oldest tiaras still worn regularly today.