It was just last week, on Friday, May 6, that we learned Brody Jenner and Kaitlynn Carter got engaged in Bali. Now we get to see Carter’s gorgeous, solitaire diamond engagement ring up close and hear all about how Jenner chose the ring thanks to an exclusive interview with L.A.-based jeweler and Carter’s bespoke engagement ring creator Adam Campbell!
Brody came to me. He knew more or less exactly what he wanted, which makes my job very very easy,” Campbell told The Knot. “Brody and Kaitlynn…these were not people who were looking for something egregiously flashy. They wanted a timeless and elegant look, and that means that the stone has to be extremely important.”
Campbell and a single business partner operate a “very under-the-radar old school business,” he said. “We do everything bespoke and by hand. We only take on one client at a time and that client has to be referred to us or someone that we know firsthand. So it has to come from, sort of one degree of separation,” he added. Think Will Smith’s ‘consultant’ character in the movie Hitch.
“We don’t do websites or anything like that. We sit with you. You come to our office, we’ll pick you up and bring you there. It’s really, really fun and offline which is nice in today’s world,” the jeweler said.
The news of Jenner’s Wednesday, May 4 engagement was brought to the public’s eye in Instagram photos shared by the future Mr. and Mrs. The groom-to-be, Jenner, proposed to his girlfriend Carter during a romantic and adventurous tropical vacation on the Indonesian islands of Bali and Sumba. The couple had been dating for about two years.
Along with the engagement announcement, Jenner wrote on his Instagram, “I couldn’t be more in love with this woman and I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with her,” after presenting his bride-to-be with a stunning sparkling diamond.
“I think a lot of times when you’re designing rings, if you don’t have the best center stone you can distract with tons of other stuff right on the sides. But when you’re just doing one stone floating on a band, it has to be a pretty special stone,” Campbell shared with The Knot. “That was the mandate he gave me. He said it needs to be kind of a ‘wow’ diamond that has that effect.”
And wow it does! The ring was just a small piece of the couple’s romantic beachside portrait, and though we got a slightly closer glimpse of the bride-to-be’s stone in Carter’s latest photo while she was “headed for a hammock in the shade to read,” Campbell revealed all the ring’s details to The Knot!
Campbell shared that Carter’s diamond is a “4-plus carat oval. It’s above a G color and above VS clarity,” and it’s paired with an 18k white gold band with “a classic 4-prong setting.”
A photo posted by Kaitlynn Carter (@kaitlynn_carter) on
“I looked through about 50 diamonds before I selected 4, and I only presented him [Jenner] with 4,” Campbell explained. “When I whittle it down to that select group, I don’t show them the certs [diamond certifications] first, I just put the diamonds out in front of them and I say (and this is kind of an old adage in diamond shopping) but I say, ‘Which one speaks to you or which one sings to you, and which one jumps off the table?’”
The jeweler told The Knot that Jenner immediately pointed to the diamond that his fiancee now wears saying, “‘That’s it. That’s the one,’” adding that Jenner happened to choose the best proportioned stone.
“The one that is the most well-cut is obviously going to be the one that reflects the most light and it’s going to have the most fire, brilliance and scintillation. And is gonna be the one where when you’re in a restaurant and someone comes in you can notice their ring from a few tables away because it’s sparkling,” He said. “He picked the best one I had out of the 50 as far as proportion, which I think is the most important characteristic, but it also happened to be a very good color and clarity stone.”
And Carter loved Jenner’s choice!
“He knew what he wanted. It was pretty romantic,” Campbell shared. “He said, ‘This is going to be the ring that she’s going to want.’ And when he did it, I got a quick message and a FaceTime from them and she said it’s everything she had wanted. So we were very, very pleased.”
Campbell shared a crystal clear closeup of the diamond in question on his Instagram account once the groom made their engagement public.
The jeweler captioned the May 6 photo, “HUGE congratulations to my dear friends @brodyjenner and @kaitlynn_carter on their engagement this week in Bali,” Cambella wrote. “I couldn’t be happier for you both and was honored to play a small part in your story. Here’s to many years of wedded bliss,” signing off with, “Love you both!”
Reiterating Jenner’s definitive design Campbell told The Knot, “My job wasn’t that difficult, I just had to hand make a simple 18k white gold band with a classic 4-prong mount and that was about it. There’s not much to distract you.”
“The idea is you want to make it look like the diamond is kind of a pillow floating on your finger and I love that. I can do the most complex settings that people want and that’s not a bad thing, but I kinda like when someone has this kind of simplistic, elegant, timeless idea,” he said. “It just means they have to be willing to get a very high quality stone, and in this case that was the whole point, Brody’s point.”
We can’t wait to see more photos of Campbell’s classic engagement ring creation on Carter’s hand because as the jeweler explained to The Knot, that diamond speaks for itself!
