7 Royal Jewels Too Ugly for Queen Elizabeth! – Hw
Seven jewels too ugly for Queen Elizabeth. Not every jewel ever placed in her hands was adored. Some glittered with history, yet carried messages the queen disliked. A choker that strangled her grace, a tiara too modern to be royal, earrings too plain for her crown. She valued elegance over spectacle, and she never hesitated to turn away.
What good is brilliance if it clashes with a monarch’s soul? These are the seven jewels Queen Elizabeth II disliked most and almost never wore. But why were they too ugly for her? That’s what we will discover today. So, let’s start. [Music] Kent Amethyst Peru. A jewel of breathtaking scale, the Kent Amethyst Peru dazzles with its deep violet stones set in gold and diamonds.
The demi Peru includes a commanding necklace, earrings, three brooches, and a pair of hair combs. Yet among all the treasures in the royal vaults, this is one sweet Queen Elizabeth II quietly disliked. Why? Because to her, Amethyst carried the wrong message. Associated with mourning, with loss, and with semnity, the queen is said to have had an aversion to them, especially the towering amethyst tiara once worn by her grandmother, Queen Mary.
The history of this pur runs deep. First owned by the Duchess of Kent, mother of Queen Victoria, the jewels appeared at grand weddings and portraits in the mid-9th century. They later became heirlooms of the crown reserved for queens themselves. Queen Alexandra dawned the necklace in 1902, and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, cautiously revived parts of the set during wartime.
When the jewels passed to Elizabeth II in 1952, expectations rose, but she wore the complete suite only once. During a state visit to Portugal in 1984, apart from rare outings such as the US state visit in 1991 or her 40th accession anniversary in 1992, the perur never became a staple. And yet, despite her distaste, the queen often reached for one piece, the single brooch without pendants, still a regular favorite.
which raises the question, will the grand amethyst tiara ever shine again? Perhaps not. [Music] Japanese diamond pearl choker. The Japanese pearl suite may glitter with royal prestige, but it carried a subtle tension in Queen Elizabeth II’s collection. Designed by Gerard in the 1970s, the set was made from pearls gifted by the Japanese government.
Its centerpiece, a four strand pearl choker with a bold diamond clasp, was paired with a matching bracelet. Elegant, yes. But unlike her long single strands or triple rows of pearls, the choker cut sharply at the neck, and that was where the queen’s dislike quietly surfaced. Elizabeth adored pearls, but chokers did not flatter her regal silhouette, nor her high- necked gowns.
They shortened the line of her neckline, a look she rarely favored. And perhaps behind palace walls, there lingered unease after Princess Diana once wore a royal emerald choker dramatically as a headpiece, reportedly irritating the queen. So while the Japanese suite was undeniably valuable, it was worn sparingly, almost reluctantly.
One of her rare outings with it came in Bangladesh in 1983, paired with the girls of Great Britain and Ireland tiara. She wore it again in Canada in 1984 and later in the 1990s for dinners at Clarages in the Chinese embassy. Yet compared to her daily pearls, the suite always felt like a guest piece in her jewel box.
Today, the Japanese pearl suite finds new life in the hands of Catherine, Princess of Wales. From Windsor Castle’s anniversary dinner to the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth, and recently at the Duchess of Kent funeral, Princess Catherine has worn it with striking grace. And so a jewel the queen disliked may yet find its true champion in the next generation.
Five Aquamarine tiara. The five aquamarine tiara is one of those rare royal pieces that dazzles in design yet failed to win the heart of the queen herself. With its five striking oval aquamarines framed in diamond ribbons and bows, the tiara was dramatic, perhaps too dramatic. Unlike her beloved Brazilian aquamarine tiara, which radiated grandeur and balance, this aquamarine ribbon tiara felt oddly modern, even theatrical.
For Queen Elizabeth II, who valued timeless elegance, it simply wasn’t royal enough. Its origin only deepened the enigma. No official records detail who commissioned it when it entered the royal vaults, or whether its aqua marines hailed from Brazil like her other set. This lack of pedigree paired with its unconventional shape may explain why the queen quietly set it aside.
She wore it publicly just once 1970 during a banquet in Yellow Knife on her Canadian tour. After that evening, it disappeared from view for over four decades. When it resurfaced, it wasn’t on the Queen, but on the then counters of Wessix, who carried it with elegance at royal weddings in Luxembourg, 2012, and Sweden, 2013, and again at a Singapore state banquet.
Most recently, both the Duchess of Edinburgh and Queen Camila have brought it back into rotation. Yet, one question lingers. If even the late Queen disliked it, will this aquamarine oddity ever escape its shadow of disfavor? Empress Maria Fodderon’s sapphire choker consisting of four rows of pearls held together by 20 diamond bars and finished with an angular sapphire and diamond clasp that could even detach into bracelets.
On paper, Empress Maria Theodora’s sapphire choker was every inch a royal treasure. Yet, Queen Elizabeth II disliked it. Chokers never suited her taste. She found them restrictive, old-fashioned, and almost theatrical. Perhaps that is why this striking heirloom, though glittering with history, appeared around her neck only once in her reign before vanishing into the shadows of her jewel vault.
Its story, however, is no less dramatic. The choker once belonged to Empress Maria Fyodorovna of Russia, who was photographed wearing it in the 1890s alongside her sisters. Against the backdrop of revolution, it became one of the few jewels she escaped Russia with, keeping it until her death in 1928. Queen Mary, always keen to preserve dynastic gems, acquired it for £6,000 and wore it occasionally in the 1930s.
When the piece passed to Queen Elizabeth in 1953, it barely saw daylight. The Queen’s distaste for chokers meant it soon found a new home. Her daughter, Princess Anne. Unlike her mother, Anne adored the drama of the design, wearing it for milestones like her 50th birthday and even Prince William’s wedding gala.
And so, a jewel once rejected by a queen continues to sparkle, just never on the neck it was meant for. Queen Victoria’s wheat ear brooches, three mirrored pairs of diamond wheat stalks, gleaming, intricate, yet overwhelmingly large. That was the design of Queen Victoria’s wheat ear bes, a set that Queen Elizabeth II is said to have disliked.
Why? Their sheer size made them difficult to wear gracefully. Unlike her preference for subtle yet commanding jewels, these brooches felt cumbersome. She wore them only sparingly, perhaps once or twice, often to pin a sash, or in rare moments of creativity woven into her hair in place of a tiara. But the truth remained.
The queen never warmed to them. Their history, however, is illustrious. Ordered in 1830 by King William IV for Queen Adelaide. Crafted by Rondell and Bridge with diamonds from the family collection, they later became part of Queen Victoria’s formal attire, glistening at grand weddings. After Victoria’s death, they passed through the crown worn memorably by the Queen Mother in Paris in 1938.
By 1952, they landed with Elizabeth, who despite her reigns grandeur, left them mostly in the shadows. Their rarest reappearance came in 2018 when she loaned three to Princess Eugenie for her wedding day. A jewel cherished by history, but never by the queen herself. Queen’s pearrop diamond earrings. Composed of two luminous pear-shaped drops suspended from smaller diamonds.
The Queen’s peardrop earrings should have been a classic triumph, but they never won her heart. Why? Some say their modest size pald in comparison to the grander coronation diamond earrings she so often favored. Others whisper that after lending them to Diana, then Princess of Wales, the Queen no longer wished to reclaim them, almost as if the sparkle had shifted to another era.
First seen on Queen Elizabeth in 1968 at the premiere of Lord Mountbatton: A Man for the Century, the earrings made a brief glittering appearance and then quietly vanished from her jewel box. In 1983, Diana revived them spectacularly. Once with the Spencer tiara and a polka dot Catherine Walker gown in Oakuckland and again days later with Queen Mary’s Lovers Not Tiara.
After those dazzling outings, the earrings disappeared from public view. Where are they now? Hidden in the royal vaults, untouched. A jewel once too delicate for a queen, yet unforgettable in the hands of a princess. Queen Mother Cartier Bracelet Bando. A jewel of striking ingenuity, the Cartier Bracelet Bando dazzled as a choker-like tiara made from five art deco diamond bracelets.
Yet for all its brilliance, Queen Elizabeth disliked them. She was never a bracelet or bangles woman. Her style was tiara’s forever wrapped in royal grace. Unlike her mother, who adored stacking all five bracelets and even mounting them as a bold bando in the glittering 1920s, Elizabeth found the effect far too loud, too restless.
Her taste lean toward understated majesty, and she preferred to slip on just one or two bracelets at a time, never the full spectacle. History tells a different story. The Duke of York gifted the bracelets to his duchess between 1923 and 1925, and the Queen Mother embraced them in portraits, ballet galas, and state events.
But when the jewels passed to Queen Elizabeth in the 1970s, the Bando form virtually disappeared. She wore it as a tiara only a handful of times, quietly setting it aside in favor of more classic diadems. Today, the legacy has shifted. The late queen’s Cartier bracelets now shimmer on Queen Camila, most recently at the celebration of Shakespeare in 2024, restoring their stage in royal life.
Thank you for watching. Once again, don’t forget to subscribe to our channel for more sparkling stories. We would love to know your thoughts on why the queen disliked these exquisite jewels.
QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.
Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.
Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.
The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.
Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.
Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.
Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.
that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music
industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.
The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.
Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.
Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.
The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.
Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.
Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.
Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.
Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.
The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.
Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.
The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.
Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.
Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.
The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.
Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.
The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.
Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.
They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.
She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.
She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.
She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.
She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it
well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.
Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.
What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.
The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.
They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.
Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.
Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and
Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.
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