“There’s no normal life,” says Doc Holliday in the 1993 movie Tombstone. “It’s just life.” And 2024 was another one of those years where we experienced more than our share of “just life.” Which extended to the jewelry business as well.
So once again we’re bringing you the weirdest, funniest, and sometimes (sorry) grossest jewelry-related stories of the year. (However, there’s no giraffe feces, or diamonds made of feces, this year, so we can all be grateful for that.) These are stories that make you say, “That’s pretty strange.” And perhaps the only reply to that is “It’s just life.”
Sit back and enjoy this year in weird.
Bernard Arnault asked to bless people’s children
Luxury, as LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault understands better than anyone, is all about mystique. As one of the world’s richest people, Arnault has acquired a bit of mystique himself.
But even he was taken aback when, on his last trip to China, people asked him to bless their babies. “It was a little strange for me,” he told Bloomberg. He didn’t mention if he went ahead with the blessings—and if he did, how much he charged.
Donald Trump hawks watches during campaign
JCK tries not to get political, but even some die-hard Trump supporters found the idea of a former (and now future) president hawking watches a little…odd, especially in the middle of a political campaign. (We don’t believe, for example, Dwight Eisenhower ever sold timepieces. And he probably could have sold a lot.)
But for those interested, the watches seem to still be available. A watch enthusiast breaks down how much profit Trump is possibly making from the all-sales-final watches here.
Woman throws her wedding ring into the sea at “divorce party”
Influencer Sabrina Philipp, who had chronicled the dissolution of her marriage on Instagram, decided to mark her final break with a lavish $30,000 “divorce party” in Miami.
After a four-course dinner with friends and family, she ceremonially disposed of her ring—a $1,000 platinum piece from Cartier—with a slingshot.
“A jeweler told me I could have melted it down and gotten around $70 for it,” she told Business Insider. “‘That’s not very fun,’ I thought. ‘Do I want $70, or do I want photos and videos of me slingshotting my wedding band into the ocean?’…I took the slingshot.” She later posted the moment on Instagram, with “The Final Countdown” as accompaniment. She had few regrets, writing, “It wasn’t that nice anyway.”
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Woman throws her rings into the sea after husband’s “prank”
On Reddit, another woman says she tossed her rings into the ocean—but she was far less happy about it.
It all started, she wrote, when she and her husband were sharing a lazy Sunday morning boat ride. “All of a sudden, my husband gets really serious and tells me, ‘Baby, I’m so sorry but I have to tell you something. I’m so sorry, please forgive me, I had an affair.’ For context, my husband thinks he’s a comedian…but he’s never joked about our marriage or relationship or cheating, ever. The way he said it, I fully believed him.”
In response, the woman, who said she’s “not a confrontational person,” stood up and silently threw her rings—worth about $10,000—into the water. “My husband’s jaw hit the floor,” she wrote. “He immediately started to yell at me that it was a joke, a prank, he wasn’t serious…. I cried too, realizing I had just thrown my lovely and sentimental rings into the ocean.”
And while her husband continued to scold her “for days,” most commenters took her side. “Your husband is very lucky that all he lost was a few rings,” one wrote. “Some humans lose much more serious, precious things in an affair: their teeth.” Could her “divorce party” be next?
Jet-lagged traveler swallows ring with handful of vitamins
Dannah McMichael had just traveled from Atlanta to Thailand, and was completely wiped and needing a shower. “I took my [wedding] ring off to shower,” she wrote on Instagram, “and without thinking, I put two magnesium pills and two hair vitamins in my hand with the ring. Without looking, I tossed everything into my mouth and washed it down with water.”
When she started choking, her husband suggested she may have swallowed her ring. A trip to the ER confirmed that she had. Luckily, she wasn’t hurt, and the ring was soon, um, retrieved, she told Newsweek, “thanks to the magnesium pills.”
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Customer believes Temu necklace was made from animal’s tooth
Temu is the Chinese e-tailer known for ultracheap merchandise. But when one U.K. customer bought a resin necklace off the site, she learned you get what you pay for—and sometimes more. “This tooth thing was hanging on the end,” Bella Moscardini said in a TikTok as she held up the necklace for the camera. “I got a sniff of it, and I’m like, ‘Ooh, that smells disgusting.”
Then she became alarmed. “It really, really looks like a dog’s tooth,” she said. “This natural decay…makes me think [it’s] been yanked out of a mouth.”
In an update a few days later, Moscardini said her college’s biology department confirmed the necklace did indeed contain an animal tooth, though it may not be a dog’s. “Outraged and disgusted,” Moscardini captioned her TikTok. Imagine how the animal feels.
https://www.tiktok.com/@bellamoscardini69/video/7437242669178342688
Super Bowl ring has a typo
When the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl this year, players received the standard championship rings, complete with 529 diamonds and facts about their victory. But this year’s rings appear to have a typo, NFL reporter Ari Meirov wrote on X, listing the Miami Dolphins as the seventh seed, when in fact they were the sixth.
News accounts speculated the Chiefs might have to get the rings redone, which would be quite costly. On his podcast, Kansas City tight end Travis Kelce indicated that’s not happening. “Who cares?” he said, according to USA Today. “They could have done no seeds on the side of them, and I would’ve been fine.… [They] screwed up about something that means nothing.” Or, to put it another way, it’s just life.
(Top photo: Getty Images)
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