Jewelry Expert Critiques Celebrities' Wedding Rings

LeBron, this guy, he's the poster child for playing with different looks and different things and different feels and vibes and colors and designs and he has a lot of rings. We see him often wearing two wide diamond bands. One vivid yellow diamonds and one white diamonds. They're two rows each. He carries that off flawlessly. They're amazing. I'm David Allen, 25-year master jeweler and diamonteer making custom jewelry here in New York City. Today we're going to talk about men's wedding rings. Men's wedding bands and wedding rings were not even considered for a very long time. Until the 1940s, men generally didn't wear rings. The only jewelry you might see on a man was his watch. It's only recently that the men's band, whether it's his wedding band or his engagement band, has become a really popular notion and something in pop culture, in culture, that has any kind of trend and fashion attached to it. It's a really, really new thing. So David Beckham is wearing super traditional yellow gold that rings about three and a half, maybe four millimeters in width and it's very, very round. That's a really classic, classic ring. Henry Golding wearing something very similar, a little bit wider. It just looks great on him with that classic clean watch, his crisp white t-shirt and suit. It just fits his style. So you have Nick Jonas and Kanye West wearing very similar rings. Dead flat on the top with a 90-degree angle on a flat side. Has a real edge to it, this ring. That's a much more modern look to a thin wedding band. You've taken that old notion of a thin gold band and you've made it much more stark and angular which gives it a bit more of a modern feel to it. So what we regard as the traditional wedding band today is actually not. The wedding band that we recognize as normal for men to wear in modern times didn't actually start to be a tradition until after World War II. Around that time when men were going off to war, they put on bands on their left ring finger to remember their loved ones. So this was for non-married couples and married couples. It became a comfortable thing that people regarded as a special way to commemorate a relationship and that's when it began to stick as what we have as the traditional wedding band. The wide band is something that is relatively new. We've seen this become more common over the last 10, maybe 15 years. The band you see on Ryan Reynolds for instance, that's about nine millimeters wide, give or take. On Jay-Z that's probably close to nine or ten as well. This is something we're seeing more and more of. You see in these two bands they're slightly different shapes. They're both little bit different alloys of yellow gold. One on Ryan is quite a bit richer yellow and on Jay-Z it's a bit of a paler yellow. This is just a style thing as well. It's not a quality thing at all but these wider bands, they look great in any shape or design that they're made in as well. So Ryan Reynolds' ring is hammered. So this is done by taking a tool called a ball-peen hammer. It has a round head on the front and you tap hammer the piece all over the place as uniformly as you can and it gives these very slight indentations all over the ring and it becomes a surface design and surface texture. Jay-Z's ring is a brushed finish. So you take an abrasive and the way we do it is we put the finished ring after it's been polished on a motor-driven spindle and with a rough emery paper, like a sandpaper, we let the ring spin and we put this matte finish around the whole ring. Dwayne Wade's ring is a much more modern look for a wide band as well. This ring was in all likelihood machine made. You see that it has on its edges about a one and a half millimeter beveled edge that looks highly polished. So this was cut out of a piece of extruded tube and cut to width and then with stationary tools as the ring spun, it was cut to that shape. So mixed metals are another great trend we're seeing a lot of. See on Denzel, he's wearing two really thin bands stacked together. One white, one yellow. So it's probably platinum and 18 karat yellow gold by the look of it. This builds great texture. This also gives him the ability to wear his ring in a couple of different ways. He can wear just his gold ring, just his white ring, wear them yellow-white, white-yellow. He can play around with this any way he wants and it builds a great look, great texture, just great color play. Steph Curry has a great ring also. That is a yellow gold band with a strip of platinum. I'm sure that's platinum because the contrast of the white gold after its plating will rub off eventually, which is called rhodium, rubs away pretty quickly, would make these colors kind of mush together. But here you have the stark contrast of the very, very white platinum and the really nice rich yellow of the 18 karat yellow gold making a wonderful two-tone ring for him. Russell Wilson is wearing a moderately wide ring. It looks like it's about seven millimeters also. It has white gold or platinum in the center in a bit of a twist and yellow gold rim on either side. This is something we are seeing more and more of also, these two-tone rings with texture brought to the face of the piece as well. Russell Westbrook, always sharp. He's got very clean style with his clothing. You can see he brings that style to his jewelry as well. That Cartier Love Ring is as clean and simple and elegant as it gets. It really fits his style very well. The Cartier Love Band. This is a ring that was born of the Cartier Love Bracelet, which has been arguably Cartier's most popular piece of history. The Love Bracelet itself was designed and inspired by the chastity belt of days past, right? So, you know, if you know that they have to be taken off with a screwdriver, the Cartier Love Ring is a single piece of jewelry. It doesn't have to be screwed on and off. It still comes from the same place. Kind of neat to see, especially men who sometimes fight the notion of a wedding band wearing something that, well, they may or may not know the history of it, that it came from such a heavy notion. But the design is great and it can show up in lots of different ways. Spike Lee is wearing it really in a beautiful way here. His looks white gold or platinum and he's wearing it next to a thinner yellow gold band. We see Spike stacking his rings all the time and this is a great look for him. Furthermore, Spike has dressed his ring up a little bit with one diamond where that screw head would be otherwise. It might be in fact around the entirety of the ring, but you see that ring both ways. It could have one stone, it could have stones every other or all the way around. And there's another way you will often see these Cartier Love Rings with pavé set diamonds all over them. So it's not just one stone in the dead center where the screw head was, but you have little pavé diamonds around the rest of the surface. So John Legend is wearing a little more of an old school wedding band in that we see this sort of pavé diamond detail on a band where you have one strip of pavé set diamonds in the center of the ring with a contrasting color metal on the outside. So it tends to be like this where the base of the band is yellow gold and the center is white diamonds. But today as men are really letting loose with their style choices, you'll see this in lots of different iterations. With black diamonds, with white metal, with rose gold, with all sorts of different color combinations. Tyrese has an amazing set of stack rings on right now. This is straight up clean and classic look. Chance the Rapper is wearing a great ring here also. Clean, sleek lines. This is called channel set where the the rims of metal around the edge of the ring are pushed delicately over the edges of the stone. So you have a very very clean sleek looking ring. The ring has no surface detailing whatsoever and on the top you just see the they look like they're floating in the middle of this channel wall. So very classic, very clean, really minimal. So Pusha T is wearing an amazing ring. This is what's loosely referred to as an eternity band. Big stones set with shared prongs going all the way around the ring. This is a style that has mostly been for women over the last 10, 20, 30 years. Now it's something guys are wearing all the time. Even when men started wearing diamonds often it was simply a band. Whether a simple band or not it was a band. But now you are seeing this trend where men are wearing these center stones like a woman's traditional engagement ring. Gucci Mane, this guy can wear some jewelry. I think every man should be comfortable wearing a big stone like this but not everybody's there yet. I think you have to start somewhere. So maybe your first piece of jewelry won't be a 20 carat diamond and that's okay. But the way Gucci wears these things he's so comfortable in his own skin that he pulls these these two rings off together so beautifully. I mean his engagement ring is this giant pear-shaped diamond with diamonds all around the band, on the prongs, everywhere. And his wedding band that he wears right behind it is a big eternity band with pavé set diamonds on it as well. So you have big diamonds, little diamonds, texture, shape. It's incredible this set that he wears. Offset is not afraid to wear big diamonds nor is his wife Cardi B. He bought her a 100 carat heart-shaped diamond for her birthday. He's got for himself here a massive emerald cut diamond. It's a giant stone that sits atop a band of emerald cut and pavé set diamonds all the way around. It just suits him, suits him really well. These are well seven-figure rings. There's no question about it. When you get to 20, 30 plus carats of a high quality, you're talking about million plus dollar rings for sure. So for diamond cuts, the modern round brilliant cut which is a highly engineered, very symmetrical 58 facet diamond that was developed in the 1940s to maximize the brilliance of the stone. It has become the industry standard. It's 70% of what is sold for diamonds in the industry. So by far the standard stone. You have the emerald cut diamond which is a step cut stone, a very clean geometric and deco looking feel to it, a rectangular shape with cut off corners. You have a square emerald cut, often referred to as an asher cut, similar but it's square. The radiant cut, the princess cut, these are all geometrical as well but unlike the emerald cut and the asher cut, they have lots and lots of facets that make the stones super brilliant. Sometimes even more brilliant than this round brilliant cut. You have the cushion cut which has become massively popular today. Think of a pillow shape if you will. Soft sides, soft rounded corners. Ovals have become massively popular in the last two years. I think last year 30% of our engagement rings that we made were oval and then there's all these specialty cuts which are much much less common. So this thorn ring that Iman Shumpert and Chris Paul are both wearing has become a very popular trend especially amongst the NBA players. It's a very cool look. So the designer says that the meaning behind these rings is the ability to break free from any struggle in your life and just keep pushing forward. So I love the notion of this ring and the design is super cool and as non-traditional as one might think they are, they're an easy option for a wedding band. It's great to put a band that has other meaning to it on for your wedding band. President Obama, I mean the quintessential cool. He's taken here the jumping off point of a simple not too wide, not too thin yellow gold band and turned it up on its head. It has ribbed lines going through it. It has perpendicular sets of wires on the ring. It's been said and people have you know started chirping about all President Obama doesn't wear his wedding band. Why? And he made it very clear that he doesn't wear his wedding band when he's out in public shaking a lot of hands because it's so very special to him. He doesn't want anything to happen with it. I totally respect that. LeBron, this guy, he's the poster child for playing with different looks and different things and different feels and vibes and colors and designs and he has a lot of rings. We see him often wearing two wide diamond bands. One vivid yellow diamonds and one white diamonds. They're two rows each. He carries that off flawlessly. They're amazing and then you see him in a pair of Cartier love bands. One is blackened gold. So that's white gold with black rhodium. It's called black rhodium but it's actually ruthenium plating on there and it's electroplated to the ring and it'll stay there for a while. It'll rub off eventually but you can have it replated and then next to it is a smaller stacked Cartier love band with pavé diamonds all over. Great, great set. He really has fun with his jewelry. Love to see that. The men's wedding ring, it's a trend that is here to stay. I'm certain of it. This world has opened up to men. Guys are seeing all of these cool, innovative, different things being done in popular culture. That's when men tend to start to understand that they can go outside of their own box and buck what has been a trend or the simple, basic thing that they've seen their whole lives and start to do things that have meaning to them, that are really personal to them. So anything from having your wedding band be something really cool, really different, stacking multiple bands, different colors, to getting yourself into a wardrobe of bands that you're constantly switching about and having fun with and changing on a regular basis, this is here to stay. I'm sure of it.