The Duchess of Cambridge’s Royal Rubies

Kate’s earliest prominent appearance in rubies came in December 2011, when she attended the Sun Military Awards at the Imperial War Museum in London. She was accompanied by her husband, the Duke of Cambridge, and her brother-in-law, the Duke of Sussex, at the ceremony.

With a black velvet evening gown by Alexander McQueen, Kate wore pieces from a suite of diamond and ruby jewels. The set was made by Mouawad, a Lebanese jewelry firm with headquarters in Geneva and Dubai. The modern floral fringe necklace and its coordinating jewelry pieces were reportedly among Kate’s wedding gifts, though the identity of the giver has never been made public.

Kate also wore the suite’s coordinating diamond and ruby bracelet on her right wrist at the awards ceremony.

Nearly a decade later, in March 2020, Kate wore earrings that appear to match the necklace’s design. She chose the diamond and ruby pendant earrings for the annual Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey in London.

Here’s another view of one of the earrings from the March 2020 appearance. The pavé-set diamond detail of the earrings is particularly clear here.

Kate also has a few other ruby jewelry pieces in her collection. In July 2017, during a visit to Warsaw, Kate wore a set of diamond and ruby jewels. The red and white colors of the jewels reflect the red and white colors of the Polish flag.

She wore a necklace, a pair of earrings, and a ring all set with diamonds and rubies. The pieces don’t look to be a matching set, but rather pieces with similar gemstones worn as a sort of “married” demi-parure.

Here’s a closer look at the necklace, which features a pendant with a ruby set in a single-row cluster of diamonds.

The earrings feature a small diamond-set stud, from which a pendant is suspended with a ruby surrounded by a double cluster of diamonds.

And the ring, worn on her right hand, features a ruby in a double-prong setting of yellow gold on a band with pavé-set diamonds.

The most magnficient ruby jewel that Kate has worn so far, though, is definitely the Greville Ruby Necklace. Made by Boucheron in 1907, the necklace was part of the jewelry haul left by Dame Margaret Greville to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in 1942. (Spoiler alert: more about that enormous jewelry bequest is coming here in a new series at The Court Jeweller in just a few weeks…!) The Queen loaned the necklace to Kate to wear at the Spanish state banquet in the summer of 2017. She paired the jewel with Queen Mary’s Lover’s Knot Tiara and the Collingwood Pearl Drop Earrings.