Olive Green Sapphire Bridge Ring

One of London's most coveted and exciting jewellery designers, Emma Franklin studied at the world-renown Central St Martins School of Art and Design. Since graduating ten years ago, Emma has slowly and carefully built a loyal clientele worldwide who commission bespoke engagement rings and other meaningful, sentimental pieces in the designer's signature style.

Working out of her London studio, Emma builds Deco-inspired designs using the finest materials, often mixing diamonds, precious gemstones and coloured enamel resulting in completely unique and complex designs. Layered and intelligently crafted, Emma Franklin's designs are smooth and sculptural, and remarkably easy to wear.

Most commonly found in shades of blue, sapphires are also available in pretty much every other colour you can think of, with pink, yellow, peach and green being the most popular after blue. Sapphires are also very hard, with their rating on the Moh’s Scale falling just under diamonds, so they make great gemstones for daily wear on the hand.

The quality and therefore price of sapphires is based on their colour, cut and clarity, and large stones can be GIA certified as diamonds are.

The colour of the sapphire is by far the most important of all these. The shade, the tone and the depth of colour, as well as the uniformity of the colour - how well the shade is spread over the stone evenly - make a huge difference to price. Deep, dark coloured tend to hide the sparkle of the stone, so become less desirable, and sapphires that show a pure, even colour and brightness will be more expensive.

You may see sapphires where there are two different shades of colour in the stone. This is called a bi-colour sapphire, and is very common. Pure coloured sapphires with a rich, even tone in a single hue are the most conventionally desirable varieties, and therefore the most expensive. Common ‘cheaper’ sapphire rings found online will often feature lesser quality gemstones and the images may have been digitally altered, so make sure you always see a coloured gemstone in real life before buying.

Depending on the size requirements sapphires make a beautiful alternative to coloured diamonds. Yellow sapphires, white diamonds and yellow gold are currently a popular choice, but our favourite sapphire shade is a murky olive green.

Sapphires are traditionally the birthstone of September. See all Sapphire rings here.

Baguette diamonds are rectangular in shape, and are usually used as side stones, or set in a line. The small number of facets, just 14, mean that like their step-cut friends the emerald cut and the Asscher cut, imperfections are clearly visible. Jewellers tend to use baguette cut diamonds as a small accent stone rather than the main feature, and they offer a sleek, minimal, low-key elegance without too much sparkle.

We love a line of channel set baguette diamonds to create a plane of solid sparkle alone the finger.

See all baguette cut diamond rings here.

14k gold has a lower content of pure gold than 18k gold, as it is comprised of 58% pure gold, 30% silver and 12% copper. Due to the lower pure gold content it is a more affordable gold choice, but is considered less precious.