Princess Charlene’s Dazzling Diamond Foam Tiara

Princess Charlene didn’t wear a tiara for her religious wedding ceremony, which was held in the courtyard of the Palais Princier in Monaco in July 2011. Instead, she wore diamond floral brooches loaned to her by her new sister-in-law, Princess Caroline. The brooches originally belonged to her husband’s grandmother, Princess Charlotte, Duchess of Valentinois. (More about those gorgeous ornaments here!)

For their wedding dinner at the Opera Terraces later the same day, Prince Albert and Princess Charlene changed into evening attire, and Charlene added a tiara to her ensemble.

For the evening festivities, Charlene swapped out her heavy wedding gown for a lighter and more festive dress with a tiered skirt. The reception dress featured Swarovski crystal embroidery. Both gowns were made for her by Armani.

Charlene emphasized the dress’s sparkle by wearing one of her most glittering wedding presents: a diamond aigrette-style tiara, commissioned for her as a gift from her new husband.

The tiara, which can also be worn as a brooch-style ornament, features a spray of diamonds that rises over Charlene’s head like the foam on a breaking wave. Charlene is a swimmer, and her groom is the ruler of a maritime principality, and so appropriately all of her bejeweled wedding presents featured nods to the water in their design.

Here’s a look at the tiara itself, which sits on a headband-style frame. The piece was custom designed for the princess by Lorenz Bäumer, a German-French jeweler with a cosmopolitan background and an established jewelry firm on the Place Vendôme in Paris. The elegant jewels uses pear-shaped diamonds to represent the droplets rising from the spray of glittering water. Bäumer dubbed the jewel the “Écume de diamants” tiara, or the “Diamond Foam Tiara.”

Ahead of the 2011 princely wedding, Charlene was featured with Bäumer in a special video about the jewel, filmed inside the Palais Princier in Monaco.

In the video, Charlene tries on the tiara, as well as a matching pair of earrings. (She didn’t wear the earrings for the wedding reception, choosing to wear the tiara alone.)

The placement of the tiara was slightly different in the video feature. In these images, Charlene wears the ornament behind her right ear, allowing the spray of diamonds to rise and hover over her hair.

On her wedding day, however, Princess Charlene wore the tiara the opposite way around, with the spray positioned behind her left ear. The effect was still sparkling, but subtler, because the angle of the tiara worn in this way meant that the diamonds nestled against her hair. To date, this is still Charlene’s only public appearance in the tiara—or in any tiara, for that matter. She’s worn another jewel, the Ocean Tiara, in a photo shoot, but we’ve not seen her wear any tiaras in public since her wedding day. Recently, Prince Albert told People magazine that he and Charlene will be attending the upcoming coronation in Britain—perhaps that will finally give Charlene a reason to wear one of her tiaras again?