Some of you may remember Laurie and Andrew’s moody halloween wedding which featured a ton of classy but macabre and morbid details, complete with the bride and groom driving off in a hearse. They got married at the International Museum of Surgical Science, surrounded by photographs, paintings and drawings, sculpture, medical equipment, skeletons, medical specimens, and historic artifacts. You probably want to look at the whole creepy wedding.
But wait, did you notice that ring Laurie’s wearing? Did you think to yourself, hey wait a minute — is that a gemstone shaped like a FREAKING COFFIN!? Well, get your zooming fingers ready, because the groom emailed with a larger photo and a few details…
Oh and if you’re wondering about the proposal that lead to this Halloween wedding, Andrew proposed in an appropriately on-theme location: Curtis Orchard & Pumpkin Patch in Champaign, IL, and on the first day of fall… Aww, lookit these spooky kids doing the perfect proposal for what ended up being a Halloween wedding!
It’s not often that we see the wedding photos BEFORE the proposal shots, but I mean it makes perfect sense that the couple who went on to have this wedding would get engaged at a pumpkin patch, doesn’t it?
If you’re now coveting Laurie’s coffin ring, and wishing you get could your own… that’s totally a thing you can do!
Let’s talk more about coffin engagement and wedding rings!
If you’re planning your own Hallowedding and inspired by the idea of a coffin-cut engagement rings, the folks at StarlandUS have some great options.
The coffin-cut rings from StarlandUS use a super distinctive, unconventional elongated geometric hexagon shape with a flat top and bottom. This sharp, architectural profile serves as the centerpiece for their signature dark romance and alternative bridal collections.
Death is already in the vows, so why not on the finger?
Plenty of vows include “till death do us part,” spoken out loud in front of witnesses, and the jewelry case still offers a solitaire that politely pretends the subject never came up. A coffin-cut stone takes the vow at its word. StarlandUS describes the shape as one that carries that promise “without flinching,” which is a lot to ask of a gemstone (six angled sides do look up to the job).
A field guide to people who love coffin-cut rings
Start with the people who deal in death for a living, or who like to say so out loud. Cristina is a funeral director in Portland, and her wedding to Raymond, a cytotechnologist, put a coffin-shaped vase and a gold-painted microscope on every guest table as a nod to their two jobs. The couple also took their engagement photos in a mausoleum and used them for the save-the-dates. This is the territory of the death-positive movement, a phrase that mortician Caitlin Doughty, who founded The Order of the Good Death in 2011, has framed as a riff on “sex positive.” A ring shaped like those vases would fit right in.
Next come the cemetery strollers. Nina and Chris held a self-uniting ceremony at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, a National Historic Landmark known for its Victorian gravestones, and the post notes the gargoyle bat details on Nina’s flats (a cat in a bat costume also escaped its leash mid-vows). StarlandUS makes a Bat collection, in case a ring ever needs to match the shoes.
Then there’s the goth and dark romance contingent, who have had a whole shelf in our archive for years. Our 2018 roundup of gothic wedding rings already included coffin-shaped stones in black diamond and black sapphire, and StarlandUS describes gothic lines like Thorns & Roses and Serpent’s Embrace as a tribute to dark romance.
Wearing mortality on your hand has precedent, too. After Prince Albert died in 1861, Queen Victoria mourned for roughly four decades and commissioned jewelry to remember him, and her example made mourning jewelry fashionable well beyond the court. (Funeral-industry pedants will add that a rectangular box is a casket and the tapered one is a coffin, so the ring is at least named correctly.)
