Pick your favorite big gun tiara!
A good tiara collection needs a headliner, don't you think? One whopper, one giant/big/large, awe-inspiring and slightly stupefying diadem to lead the way, to be brought out for the V.I.P. occasions. This is another extremely subjective category - you have to define what constitutes a big gun tiara for yourself.
Do you define it purely on size? The bigger the better?
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| Giant tiaras on, left to right: Gloria, Dowager Princess Thurn and Taxis; Queen Marie of Romania; Diane, Duchess of Württemberg |
What about relative importance in a collection? Take the Swedish collection, for example. Several of their tiaras could probably qualify on size alone, but there's a clear leader: the Braganza Tiara, only brought out for certain occasions. And then there are the tiaras which serve these days as specifically queen's tiaras, like the Fleur de Lys Tiara from Spain or Empress Joséphine's Emerald Tiara from Norway, giving them added importance relative to the rest.
Are you judging on pure carat power? It's hard to beat the solid fortress of diamonds contained in the Luxembourg Empire Tiara, or the size of just the headline diamond in the Stuart Tiara.
And so on, and so on. Here are a few more that we've featured before that might fit the bill:
Above, left to right: the Boucheron Honeycomb Tiara, the Leuchtenberg Sapphire Tiara, the Mellerio Sapphire Tiara.
The Delhi Durbar Tiara, Queen Fabiola's Spanish Wedding Gift Tiara, the Poltimore Tiara, Empress Joséphine's Diamond Tiara as loaned to Princess Grace
And now I leave it to you, as I know you have something else in mind that I didn't catch here. I shall leave you to ponder - we will return on Friday, when we'll have our regular Thursday tiara feature delayed one day. And yup, it will be another big gun!
As a reminder, your collection has one member already: Queen Alexandra's Kokoshnik Tiara.
Ready to vote for your favorite?
-Vote for one tiara in the comments. (If you're mentioning multiple tiaras in your comment, indicate which one gets your vote, or I will just count the first one.)
-I will also count the number of "likes" or up arrows on those comments, so you can vote that way too.
-Non-royal tiaras and tiaras that no longer exist are fair game too.
UPDATE: Thank you for all your contributions! Voting is now closed.
Photos: Getty Images/Wikipedia/The Royal Forums/Polfoto/Corbis
