Description
Two mandarin garnets sit side by side on a plain band, held in claws, one slightly larger than the other — 8.30 and 13.00 carats, 21.30 in total. Both are oval cut, and both are the same vivid orange: not amber, not red, but the flat bright orange of the fruit the stone is named for.
The design is toi et moi — you and me — a two-stone arrangement that has been in use since the eighteenth century and is usually built from a matched pair. Here the pairing is deliberately unequal. The larger stone leads, the smaller answers it, and the difference in scale is what makes the ring read as a conversation between two stones rather than a symmetrical ornament.
Mandarin garnet is spessartite, coloured by manganese, and it is one of the few gems that reaches this level of saturated orange without any assistance. These two are of Nigerian origin, from the deposits that made the material widely available from the 1990s onward. The band is left plain and unset, so nothing intervenes between the metal and the colour.
