Where Are Jackie Kennedy’s Engagement Rings Now? (2024)

Toi et moi engagement rings, composed of two stones set on a single band, have been around for centuries (they date back to Napoleonic times). Though they’ve surged in popularity in recent years, they were actually put back on the map a few decades ago by Jackie Kennedy, who debuted her Van Cleef & Arpels rock—complete with a 2.88-carat diamond and a 2.84-carat emerald nestled together on a baguette-studded band—in the 1950s, reports Vogue. The bauble has a unique origin story (then-Senator John F. Kennedy didn’t actually use it to propose) and a mysterious history; per The Adventurine, the future first lady wasn’t pictured wearing it all that much—and she ultimately redesigned it before she stopped wearing it altogether in the wake of John's death. But what happened to the two-stone stunner? Luckily, we know exactly where it is now—and the same is true for Jackie’s second engagement ring, a 40.4-carat diamond that Aristotle Onassis gave her before they married in 1968.

We'll start at the beginning: While working for a newspaper, Jackie met her first husband, a young senator from Massachusetts, at a party in 1952, and less than a year later, the couple was engaged. (During that time, Jackie broke off her first engagement to stockbroker John Husted Jr., who she met at Vassar College; she ultimately returned that engagement ring, which had diamonds and sapphires, reports People.) Little is known about the late president’s proposal; Boston’s Omni Hotel claims to have been the site of his knee-drop, and their website suggests that he actually had the toi et moi piece at the ready for the moment.

Writer Jay Mulvaney, however, wrote in Kennedy Weddings that Jackie and John selected the ring at a later date—and she didn’t regularly wear it during the couple’s short engagement (they tied the knot in Newport, Rhode Island, in September 1953, just three months after they announced their intention to wed). “Jack and I looked at dozens of them. Some I didn’t like and others weren’t the right type,” she said. According to an excerpt from Edward Klein’s All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy published in Vanity Fair, it was John’s father, Joseph Kennedy, who picked out the ring at the jewelry house’s Fifth Avenue store in New York City.

We don’t know when, exactly, Jackie acquired the engagement ring, which several outlets estimate was worth over $1 million at the time of its purchase—but we do know that she redesigned it at some point in the early 1960s (The Adventurine suggests that the piece’s revamp coincided with the White House renovation Jackie oversaw in 1961). The piece went back to Van Cleef & Arpels for the job; the jeweler replaced the baguettes on the sides with marquise-shaped diamonds, which better reflected the other jewelry she wore during that time period.

Jackie continued to wear the ring discreetly over the course of her and John’s 10-year long marriage, up until his assassination in 1963. As for where the piece is today? The emerald and diamond engagement ring lives with the other pieces in the late first lady’s preserved jewelry collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, where it occasionally goes on display.

Jackie received one more engagement ring—technically, her third—in her lifetime from her second husband Aristotle Onassis (who infamously first dated her sister, Lee). She and the shipping tycoon were long-time friends who knew each throughout the duration of her first marriage, reports Daily News. Their platonic relationship turned romantic about five years after John’s death during a trip to Greece in 1967; they were married in October 1968.

When Aristotle proposed, he did so with a positively massive stone, cementing Jackie's status as one of the wealthiest women in the world. Her 40-carat Lesotho III diamond ring was from Harry Winston—and she primarily kept the heirloom in a bank vault (she preferred to wear what she called her “swimming ring,” which later inspired her daughter-in-law Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s simple engagement piece). Following her death, the Lesotho diamond sold for $2.58 million at Sotheby’s auction in 1996; it had originally been valued at $600,000 by appraisers, according to the Los Angeles Times. It was bought by Albert and Felice Lippert, the founders of Weight Watchers, on behalf of an anonymous purchaser who was never identified—so there’s still some mystery surrounding its current status.