La Rose de Trinity: Behind the Pink Enamel

Some commissions arrive as a sketch. La Rose arrived as a sentence: a heart, in rose gold, the colour of the first roses of the season.

The stone

We began, as always, with the centre stone — a 1.52-carat heart, graded F for colour and VS1 for clarity. A heart cut is the most unforgiving silhouette in the diamond alphabet: the two lobes must match to a fraction of a millimetre, or the eye reads the asymmetry instantly. It took our cutter three weeks to find the right rough.

The enamel

The signature of the piece is its hand-fired pink enamel, laid into engraved channels along the shoulders of the band. Enamel is glass, and glass and gold expand at different rates in the heat of the kiln. Each of the three firings is a small gamble; a single bubble means starting again.

• Firing one sets the base — a pale, almost-white blush.
• Firing two deepens the rose and fuses it to the engraving.
• Firing three seals the surface to a glassy, durable finish.

One of one

Pavé diamonds and a whisper of pink sapphire frame the centre. The piece is, and will remain, a single edition — 1 of 1. The original commission now belongs to its owner; what you see in the atelier is our tribute to it, and an invitation to begin a story of your own.