Perhaps more than any sign in the Zodiac, the name “Leo” perfectly encapsulates all of the traits possessed by those born under this sign. Like the king of the jungle that is their namesake, Leo is a proud beast with a commanding aura and a striking appearance. Oftentimes, Leo knows this, too, and their high self-esteem can veer into self-centeredness and too much concern about what others think of them. Leo loves to be the center of attention and earn the praise of their friends, but this need for praise can sometimes mask a deep insecurity. At their best, Leo is a natural-born leader, a devoted protector, and the life of the party.

Element: Fire

While fire tends to fuel the fighting spirit of Aries and the passion of Sagittarius, the fire within Leo is more like a hearth, warm and welcoming, the center around which the family gathers. This fire sign is less of a raging forest fire and more of a cozy autumn backyard bonfire.

Ruling Planet: The Sun

Yes, we know that the Sun is not a planet. Last month we covered Cancer, which is ruled by the Moon, which is also not a planet. In astrology terms, anything in the night sky that doesn’t seem “fixed” against the background of the sky is a planet: the Sun, the Moon, and the planets that we can see with the naked eye, which look like stars that move independently of the others.

Befitting the sign’s larger-than-life, center-of-attention personality, Leo’s ruling planet is the Sun. The sun can represent the ego around which everything revolves, or it can represent a warm, lifegiving glow. It can burn us, or it can bring light to our lives. Leo encompasses this duality.

Leo Aesthetics

Leo is big, bold, and loves to be a spectacle. Leo also tends to have a great sense of humor and doesn’t take themselves too seriously. They love fun, daring looks that are both stylish and highly individualistic. A textured two-tone ring in red and yellow gold or a striking, unique design from our Twists collection is the kind of thing that is right up Leo’s alley.

Compatibility With Other Signs

As one of the flirtiest, most magnetic, most confident signs, a Leo can make a relationship work with any other sign. No matter which sign you end up with, knowing yourself, allowing yourself to be honest and vulnerable, and being receptive to your partner’s needs are the keys to happiness. Understanding your tendencies and traits as well as those of your partner’s can help you turn any perceived point of incompatibility into a strength.

Aries: Fire signs tend to have good chemistry with each other. A Leo-Aries relationship is bound to be a passionate one. Both signs have a competitive streak, though, so watch out for conflict when one half of the relationship steals the spotlight from the other.

Taurus: There is a bit of “irresistible force meets immoveable object” here. Both signs love luxury and all the finer things in life, but whereas Taurus would rather luxuriate in their silk pajamas and 1000 thread count sheets, Leo wants to put on their best outfit, find a party, and let everybody know just how good they’re living. But if the two can put their egos and stubbornness aside, these two can enjoy a stable, fun, and devoted relationship.

Gemini: Gemini and Leo are both outgoing, social creatures, but as we said in our Gemini blog, “if there’s one sign that wants to be the center of attention more than Gemini, it’s Leo.” Many Leos would love nothing more than a life of adventure with their best friend. That’s just what Leo will get out of a relationship with Gemini.

Cancer: Emotional, introverted Cancer doesn’t seem like a great match for Leo at first. But just as lions love bringing the hunt home to their pride, Leo loves to take care of their partner. Cancer needs to know that they are loved and adored by their partner, and Leo will give Cancer that adoration and loving family life they crave.

Leo: Get two Leos together and the result is more like two housecats in the same apartment than two lions. They’ll either end up as inseparable best friends, constantly finding new things to get into and new places to explore, or they’ll spend a lot of time getting on each other’s nerves. While Leo can enjoy the deepest of connections with another Leo, both will have to make sure they are staying true to themselves and their partner and not becoming too self-absorbed, competitive, and egotistical.

Virgo: Like Taurus, Virgo is an earth sign, and like a Leo-Taurus relationship, Leo-Virgo has potential, as both signs love a stable home life. Virgo might be a little too fastidious, detail-oriented, and, let’s face it, critical for free-spirited Leo. Leo wants praise, not feedback or notes, no matter how constructive. If they don’t get that doting support, their confidence can quickly turn into insecurity. For this to work, Virgo has to make their brutal honestly a little less brutal, and Leo has to understand that anything Virgo has to say is coming from a place of love and support.

Libra: Here we have the two most charming, stylish signs in the zodiac. They both love to be noticed and praised, whether that’s for their good looks, their sense of humor, or their creativity. From the outside, these two look like a power couple to be envied by all. The true test of this relationship is what happens at home, when no one else is watching. As we said above, Leo’s outer perfection can conceal a deep insecurity. That insecurity can lead Leo to lash out, especially if Libra’s habit of avoiding conflict at all costs gets too frustrating.

Scorpio: This relationship can turn into a real power struggle, and a weird one at that. While both signs want to be the dominant voice in the relationship, they see the world in starkly different terms. Both signs value honesty, but whereas Leo is honest with others but sometimes less than honest with themselves, Scorpio is true to their own internal sense of honesty while seeing nothing wrong with keeping secrets from others. Once the initial passionate attraction wears off, both signs will have to work at creating and maintaining a sense of trust.

Sagittarius: Another fire sign, a Leo-Sagittarius relationship will be just as passionate as a Leo-Aries one. Sagittarius is even more adventurous and free-spirited than the other two fire signs, which could be a great match for a high-energy Leo.

Capricorn: Capricorn is the workaholic of the zodiac. As an earth sign, they are stable and dependable, but tend to go after their goals using conventional means. This all spells boredom for Leo. But if there’s one thing Leo loves, it’s when a love interest plays hard to get, and there’s no one harder to get close to than stony Capricorn.

Aquarius: Leo and Aquarius are opposites on the zodiac wheel, and in astrology, opposites attract. These are two highly individualistic signs. Leo expresses their individuality by becoming the hub of any social circle, while Aquarius expresses theirs through a quirky, outsider, esoteric energy. Leo is the center, and Aquarius exists at the margins. In that way, these two signs complete each other: Aquarius gives Leo the confidence to truly be themselves, while Leo gives Aquarius the community they need to fulfill their identity.

Pisces: Leo and Pisces, fire and water. Leo burns brightly and enticingly, and Pisces, a water sign, goes with the flow. Leo can provide the direction in life Pisces is often lacking, and Pisces can provide the romance and devotion Leo needs to become comfortable and authentic without being self-absorbed. While these two signs see the world in very different ways, their differences complement each other and can form the basis of a relationship of mutual support and discovery.

Your Love is Written in the Stars

Who is the one worthy of your love and protection, Leo? No matter how the stars have aligned for you, you’ll find your match in our Zodiac collection. Check out the collection and design your paired Zodiac rings here. Just choose your ring sizes and your signs and we’ll take care of the rest!

No one can do everything alone. That’s true no matter what you’re doing. We’re inherently social creatures, and we’ve evolved to depend on one another and work in groups. Sure, there are things you can do with no help from anyone, but every creative pursuit is improved by some level of collaboration. Writers might sit at their desk alone pounding at their keyboards for hours, but they have friends and partners to bounce ideas off of and editors to help polish those ideas to perfection. Artists of all kinds have colleagues, teachers, influences, and supporters behind them helping them bring their works of art to life. Even people we don’t know are collaborators, in a sense: someone had to cut down the tree, someone else had to turn it into the paper we are writing on or drawing on or notating a piece of music on.

In the jewelry world, there is a massive worldwide network backing up even the most solitary jewelry designer, a globe-spanning supply chain getting gemstones and metals from mines to their bench, not to mention all of the people building the tools that jewelers use and working with jewelers to develop new ones. Different artisans will have a hand in cutting and polishing gemstones, casting and working gold, or engraving designs into the surface of the metal.

At a more intimate level, there’s the collaboration between designer and client. While works of art often suffer when too many people get involved, there’s something magical that happens when a few like-minded people get together to create something beautiful and meaningful.

We tend to exalt the individual genius, but so much great art is born of collaboration. Though his unmistakable works of art are signed “Rembrandt,” he wasn’t creating those paintings alone. He had a whole studio of apprentices and specialists. One artist might sketch out the pose or paint the face; another might specialize in realistically rendering the intricate folds of a queen’s gown or the complex pattern of her lace collar.

Rembrandt and many other Renaissance artists collaborated with their studio artists and developed ideas alongside their patrons. Artists of all kinds need their collaborators. Stan Lee, creator of Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Avengers, and so many other classic superheroes, couldn’t have done it without artist Jack Kirby putting images to Lee’s words. It took the special talents of John Lennon and Paul McCartney together to write those Beatles songs. In poetry, creative duos like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge or T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound pushed each other to new artistic heights.

With the Design Center, we give you the tools to become our artistic collaborator. You and your partner understand your relationship better than anybody. You know how to best symbolize that relationship in the form of a custom wedding band. We have the technical knowledge and the artistry to bring those ideas to life. Let’s work together and create something special.

Jewelry and technology has always gone hand-in-hand. The earliest metallurgists were more artists than scientists, but they couldn’t have worked their magic without the aid of the high-tech devices of their day: the furnace and the bellows. The progress of the jeweler’s craft through the ages is a story of technological advancement, with new technology arising to serve human imagination.

When we think about technology, we tend to think about “high technology”: electronics, computers, robots, and the like. But tools that seem low-tech to us were once the state of the art. As new technology and techniques are developed, some are adopted and become industry standards, and some fall by the wayside. It’s that balance that we want to achieve: the balance of traditional and high-tech, combining a mastery of hand-crafted artistry with the technological expertise that lets us push our vision into new frontiers.

Technology That Helps Bring the Artist’s Vision to Life

If we covered all the ways that advancements in tools, technology, technique, and machinery have changed the art of jewelry-making, this blog post would be a book. Here are just two examples of new technological developments allowing us to do new and creative things with metal.

At the end of the Stone Age, about 8000 years ago, artisans in the Near East discovered that they could melt down copper and work it into objects, typically tools or decorative and ceremonial objects. Furnaces would have to be heated to over 1000°C (about 2000°F) to separate the copper ore from slag, which required another technological innovation: the bellows. Once the copper was separated from the slag, it could then be hammered into shape. This technology formed the basis that the art and science of metalworking would develop from over millennia.

The next few thousand years brought new techniques for building hotter and hotter fires. It wasn’t until the mid-19th century that platinum could be melted down. Before then, platinum didn’t have much use. The oxyhydrogen blowpipe was the first torch hot enough to heat platinum to its melting point of over 1700°C (about 3000°F). This technological advancement ushered in the golden age of platinum jewelry, spanning the Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In between these two advancements were thousands of others that gave metalsmiths and stonecutters the ability to create the jewels that define civilizations, from the ancient Egyptians to the Mughals of 16th century India.

Computer-Aided Design: Enabling Greater Precision and Creativity

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) is one of the many technologies that has allowed us to take our creativity and precision to new levels. One of the drawbacks of sketching out jewelry designs on a sheet of paper is that you’re working in 2D. It’s not impossible, but it’s harder to know if a particular design is going to actually work. You might end up with a pretty drawing, but not a functional piece of jewelry. CAD lets you design in three dimensions, rotating the design, zooming in on details, and creating an amazingly precise design.

On the customer’s end, you can see the value of a photorealistic rendering in the Design Center. Jewelry is three-dimensional. It has to look beautiful no matter what direction you’re seeing it from. Getting that instant feedback on your design in the form of a photorealistic 3D image that you can rotate and zoom in on is so much more useful than just seeing a 2D image.

Part of the jeweler’s skill is in deciding the best tool for the job, a traditional one or a high-tech one. A skilled jeweler has a deep familiarity with the traditional, fundamental techniques of the artform. Without this knowledge, we wouldn’t be able to get the most out of the technology we use. Combining the best modern technology with a mastery of traditional techniques is how we bring you the meticulously crafted pieces found in our collections.

Conventional wisdom holds that you shouldn’t mix metals. “Don’t wear that gold necklace with those silver earrings,” someone may have told you once, “You’re going to look like a mess, like you just threw on whatever you had lying around with no thought for creating a coherent aesthetic.” Just take, for example, this forum post from 2005 asking, “Do you mix metals?” Some posters say it’s fine to do, some say they would never do it. Twenty years ago, mixed metal looks were still contentious. Twenty years before that, it was strictly forbidden by the arbiters of style.

But who were these arbiters of style? It's not clear why “don’t mix metals” was accepted as a hard-and-fast rule of fashion for so long. It’s possible that, like the old “no white after labor day” edict, its roots lay in the classism of the late 19th century. The turn of the century was a time when the old money aristocratic class devised rules to set them apart from the nouveau riche, who they saw as “uncultured.” Which fork to use, what color shoes to wear, how to wear jewelry: all these rules were about enforcing class distinctions, creating an in group and an out group. Over time, these rules of etiquette would filter down to the rest of us, devoid of their original context.

This era—the late 1800s, early 1900s—was also the first era of platinum jewelry. In the early 19th century, platinum was an oddity, rare outside of Russia (where it was used in coins), and difficult to work with due to its high melting point. But technological advances made it easier to melt and shape into jewelry. At the turn of the century, Fabergé helped to popularize both platinum and rose gold. The Art Nouveau era and the Ard Deco era saw a number of fabulous, dazzling designs in these two metals. Art Nouveau favored whimsical designs patterned after the shapes of the natural world, while Art Deco presented a more modern, angular style for the beginning of the age of technology. Look at portraits from these eras and you’ll find women in either all gold, all silver, or all platinum ensembles.

The reign of platinum jewelry would soon come to an end. In 1939, World War II began, and the platinum that would have been used in jewelry was appropriated for the war effort. White gold had been around before WWII as a low-cost alternative to platinum, but its popularity took off during and after the war. As the 20th century progressed, jewelry and fashion in general became something more personal than just a marker of class, a way for us to express something about ourselves. It’s only natural that out of this proliferation of choice, people started experimenting with mixed metals.

Over the course of the 21st century, we’ve seen the rise of layered necklaces and stacks of rings in different metals, among other mixed metal trends. You see mixed metals everywhere these days. It was one of the biggest jewelry trends of 2023 and 2024, and once again, it is set to “take over this summer,” as Vogue put it. It seems that mixing metals has gone from a trend to just another way to express yourself with jewelry.

Now that mixing metals is an acceptable fashion choice, what is the next frontier? Two-tone jewelry, or jewelry that combines two metals in one piece. Two-tone designs give you the best of both worlds. You get the unity of style of a single-colored metal with the statement of a mixed metal look. Our designs, combining two and sometimes three metals in a single ring, are designed with timelessness in mind. After all, the goal is to wear that wedding band for the rest of your life. A two-tone ring combines that timeless, classic wedding band feel with a modern sensibility and personalized flair.

Times have changed. The old rules are out. What’s in is creating a more individualistic look that makes you feel good and reflects your sense of self. It takes a little more work to figure things out for yourself, but developing your personal taste is ultimately so much more rewarding than blindly following outdated rules.