The Swedish Diamond Epaulette Earrings

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The Swedish royal jewelry collection is absolutely lousy with sparkling earrings, but today’s earrings, the Diamond Epaulette Earrings, surely take the prize for the most diamond-packed pair.

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The earrings’ most important appearance in recent memory came at the pre-wedding gala for Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel in June 2010. Victoria wore the earrings with a stunning one-shoulder gown. The neckline of the dress worked particularly well with the long earrings.

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The earrings are called “epaulette” earrings because, well, that’s what they used to be. In days gone by, when royal men would wear elaborate, jewel-encrusted military uniforms, these diamond epaulettes rested on the shoulders of a particularly sparkly dress uniform. Reusing the epaulettes as earrings is a rather ingenious move; they’d never be worn in public today in their original form, so repurposing them has saved them from gathering dust in a royal vault — or, even worse, from being broken up.

Crown Princess Victoria has been the primary wearer of the earrings in recent years, but they’ve also been worn in public by another Bernadotte: Princess Madeleine, who paired them with her Modern Fringe Tiara at her father’s birthday gala in 2016.

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But it’s been Victoria who has gotten the most mileage out of the pair. She wore the earrings at the annual King’s Dinner for the Nobel Prize laureates in 2011; more recently, she wore them with the Baden Fringe Tiara in Oslo for the Norwegian royal birthday gala.

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What do you think of this bit of royal jewel recycling: an effective choice, or a bejeweled blunder?