It’s a bit hard to believe when you see her, but this month, the Countess of Wessex is celebrating her fiftieth birthday. I’m hoping that Sophie’s husband helps mark the occasion by making some additions to her jewelry collection; we’re celebrating here at The Court Jeweller by making her our Magpie of the Month! Let’s kick off our series on Sophie’s jewels with a look at one of her most important brooches: her pair of diamond clips.

The brooch was the Queen Mother’s wedding gift to Sophie in 1999, so it’s extremely appropriate that we saw her wear the clips for one of the first times in public at the Queen Mum’s 99th birthday celebrations that August.

Sophie also wore them early on for a sadder event: the Queen Mother’s funeral in March 2002.

You can just see the clips here peeking out from Sophie’s wrap at the 2004 royal wedding in Denmark. In the early years of her marriage, Sophie tended to wear the pair of clips separately. However, like many sets of Art Deco clips, they can also be worn together as a duet to form a single brooch. Most sets like this come with a special frame that allows the pieces to be hooked together; here’s a set of photographs from an auction of another set of diamond clips that shows how the frame works.

For an appearance at Royal Ascot in 2005, it seems that Sophie decided to wear just one of the pair of clips — it’s nestled beside her ID badges.

For the Queen’s 80th birthday dinner, Sophie wore the clips again as a pair, using them to highlight the square neckline of her gown.

And both pieces again appeared at Royal Ascot in 2007. To my knowledge, the exact provenance of the pieces isn’t known. The Art Deco style certainly suggests a 1930s creation date. My guess is Cartier, given the similarities to other clips made by the firm and the fact that they were the house that popularized the style. I don’t think we know whether the Queen Mum acquired these specifically for Sophie or shopped her own jewelry vaults for the present, but we do know that George VI loved buying presents for his wife at Cartier in the ’30s, so it certainly seems plausible to me that these are family pieces of jewelry. (Update: The clips were indeed from the Queen Mum’s collection; here’s an image of Elizabeth wearing them on her hat.)

In recent years, Sophie has worn the clips more often as one brooch, as she did at Royal Ascot in 2010. This angle gives you a good look at the pieces worn together on a single frame.

And here they are once more at Royal Ascot in 2014. The clips are some of my favorite pieces from Sophie’s jewelry box — sparkling, versatile, and with a great Queen Mum association. I think we’ll be seeing her wear these classic pieces over and over again for years to come.

When Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent decided how to divvy up her jewels in her will, she followed an old-fashioned royal principle: give the jewels to your sons so that their wives can wear them. Where daughters are concerned, it’s their husbands’ families who are responsible, then, for bejeweling them. Because of this, our Magpie of the Month, Marina’s daughter Alexandra, doesn’t have many Kent heirloom jewels in her possession.

Instead, she has smaller collections of gems, probably acquired at some point during her marriage to Sir Angus Ogilvy. Today, we’re chatting about her diamond and emerald jewelry, a collection of various pieces that she wears at both day and evening events.

Alexandra has a few items of diamond and emerald jewelry with a geometric, almost Art Deco style. These include a pair of diamond and square-cut emerald studs, worn above at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2012.

She sometimes pairs the emerald earrings with a diamond and emerald butterfly brooch, as she did at the Royal Academy of Art in 2012…

…but sometimes she wears the earrings with a gorgeous diamond and emerald brooch, which I’d classify as one of the most stunning jewels in Alexandra’s collection.

She’s also worn the diamond and emerald brooch as a hat ornament. It coordinated perfectly with the green velvet hat she wore to the diamond wedding service for the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh in 2007.

Alexandra also has another large emerald in her collection. It forms the clasp of a pearl choker, similar to the pieces worn by many of her fellow royal ladies, including the Duchess of Cornwall and the late Diana, Princess of Wales. The emerald, which appears to be a cabochon, is surrounded by diamonds. Above, Alexandra wears the choker at Margaret Thatcher’s 80th birthday party in 2005.

The most high-profile outing for the emerald and pearl choker, however, was the dinner held the night before Prince William’s wedding in 2011. In the photograph above, she also appears to be wearing an emerald ring on her right hand.

Princess Alexandra, our Magpie of the Month, prefers to wear choker necklaces that sit close to the throat. You’ll see her most often wearing a pearl choker with a diamond-shaped clasp, but she does have other necklaces in her collection, including today’s piece.

The necklace is intricate and appears to be primarily set with diamonds, though good close-ups are elusive; from some angles, I think I can see pearls in the setting as well. (That is, of course, if it’s not costume jewelry — but Alexandra’s pieces mainly seem to be the real deal.) To my knowledge, this necklace hasn’t been discussed much, and I don’t know its provenance. However, I do know that photographs show Alexandra wearing it for at least the past twenty years. The image at the top of this post shows her wearing the necklace at a gala event in January 1995.

The choker has made appearances at some big family milestone events for the Windsors. She selected the necklace for the 70th birthday party for her brother, the Duke of Kent, in 2005, and a year later, she wore the same necklace to the Ritz for the Queen’s 80th birthday party. Choker necklaces aren’t always easy to wear, but on elegant Alexandra, this one’s a winner for me.