Hats Aren’t Square … and Rings Shouldn’t Be Round

It was one in the morning, and I couldn’t sleep. So I picked up the new bridal magazine.

But I came to a halt on the first page — and not just because my wide-bodied cat plunked herself down on the fold in a bid for attention. No, it was an ad that caught my eye (good job, ad guys!). And the ad was for these obscenely expensive-looking wedding bands just dripping with diamonds.

Nothing special in a bridal magazine, since most of us can reasonably expect to be proposed to by a Kennedy, right? The difference was, these bands were square-shaped. Or more accurately, finger shaped. When I looked at these bands, the top of my head blew off. Because, as the tagline stated, “Fingers Are Not Round.”

And they’re right. Fingers are nowhere near round. You realize exactly how not-round they are when you look at a photo of a ring actually designed to fit a finger. It’s an ergonomic and intellectual breakthrough. It’s like the moment when women suddenly realized that corsets maybe weren’t such a great idea, even though everyone was wearing corsets and their grandmothers had worn corsets for as long as anyone could remember.

How did we end up wearing round bands to begin with, when even the most careless glance reveals that our fingers aren’t round?


Here’s a historical recap:

4000 BC: You manage to get some kind of ore out of quartz. You turn it into something resembling jewelry using only your toolkit of tiger tooth and soap stone. You’re lauded as a genius and become a special favorite of the desert king. You’re killed by jealous courtiers.

1100 AD: You enjoy an advanced set of metallurgy skills (and attempt to create gold out of tin in your spare time). You can create any ring that the mind can imagine, but it’s the Middle Ages, so you make them as uncomfortable as humanly possible. Jewelry, like anything else, should remind us that life is hard and death is imminent.

1955 AD: Tradition is good, and round rings don’t just remind us that we’re goooooooo-ing to the chapel-and-we’re gooooing to get maaaar-ied, they also deliver that wonderful little charge associated with royalty. After all, round rings look just like mini versions of the coronets and crowns that big shots always wear at their nuptials, and they make us all feel like the leads in Tristan and Isolde. Plus, as our mothers constantly reminded us, Pain is the Price of Beauty. Or was that just my mother?

2007-2015 AD: Liberation!


Unfortunately my budget doesn’t currently cover the cost of a bodacious finger-shaped band from a forward-thinking designer. But if it did, I guarantee you that’s exactly what I’d be drooling over right now. In the meantime, I’ll suffer through with my little band that’s round as can be, which means the sparkly bits are always on the bottom, lighting things up for the palm of my hand.

square wedding bands, square wedding rings