The Most Popular Jewellery Trends in the UK
From the most popular jewellery pieces to our favourite metals to wear, discover the biggest jewellery trends of the moment
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The Most Popular Jewellery Trends in the UK
From the most popular jewellery pieces to our favourite metals to wear, discover the biggest jewellery trends of the moment
Throughout history and across different cultures, jewellery has become the perfect accessory, a treasured gift, and an enduring symbol of admiration and love. In fact, the UK spent over £10 billion on jewellery in 2022 alone.
But which pieces are loved the most? We’ve taken it upon ourselves to do some digging, to find out what the most popular traditional, classic and luxury jewellery trends are across the UK. From each town’s favourite jewellery pieces to the most popular metals and gemstones across the country.
We gathered data by studying the most popular search terms on Google related to different types of jewellery, metals, and precious and semi-precious gemstones.
We defined ‘obsession’ simply as the sum of all jewellery-related searches from each of the 40 largest towns in the country. We then adjusted this based on each town’s population to avoid skewing our findings towards the largest cities.
We converted our findings into scores from 1 to 100 for each category. We then created an overall score out of a maximum score of 100, which you can see in the table below.
Newcastle is the most jewellery-obsessed city in the UK
Once our research was complete, we combined our findings by averaging the scores across the range of precious metals and stones we studied. Newcastle shone brightly at the top of our overall table, consistently scoring amongst the highest in each category of jewellery type, metals and gemstones.
Specifically, Newcastle ranked four different jewellery types; chains, bracelets, rings and earrings, as equal favourites. The city also ranked in first place an array of precious and semi-precious stones and metals. Silver, platinum and copper were all preferred to gold in Newcastle. Among precious gemstones, rubies and emeralds were preferred over sapphires, and surprisingly, Moissanite outperformed diamonds.
Second, on our overall list of most jewellery-obsessed states was Manchester. The so-called Capital of the North’s overall score put the city in a close second place to Newcastle.
Manchester also had the highest overall score in two of our jewellery categories; necklaces and general jewellery.
In third place on our overall table, was Leeds. We discovered this city has a particular affinity for nose jewellery, preferring this over any other town. Together with high rankings across most other categories, this cemented its third-place position.
One big surprise from our research was that London was the 10th most jewellery-obsessed city in the UK. We would have expected it to be closer to the top of our list.
| CITY | OVERALL SCORE OUT OF 100 |
|---|---|
| NEWCASTLE | 93.92 |
| MANCHESTER | 87.13 |
| LEEDS | 84.71 |
| BIRMINGHAM | 74.91 |
| BRADFORD | 57.68 |
AT THE TOP
The Most Popular Jewellery Types in the UK
For this section, we grouped different types of jewellery including bracelets, rings and necklaces to give us a broad overview of what was popular around the country.
Our findings followed the same general pattern as the most jewellery-obsessed city. Newcastle once again ranked in first place for the city most interested in a range of jewellery types; specifically bracelets, chains, earrings and rings.
Manchester is the city most obsessed with necklaces, while Leeds has a clear preference for nose jewellery over all other types.
We also wanted to see which towns and cities were obsessed with ‘luxury’ jewellery items specifically. We defined ‘luxury’ as precious metals and gemstones, i.e. gold, platinum, diamond, emerald, sapphire, and ruby. Our luxury score was the average score of each of these items. This meant we could make a distinction between a search like ‘diamond ring’ and one for ‘luxury diamond ring’. When we examined the data through this lens, we found that, once again, Newcastle topped the rankings with Manchester and Leeds close behind.
Regionally, it seems that northern English cities tend to be more obsessed with jewellery than other areas of the UK. Their scores topped our table and were much higher than average. Meanwhile, the Welsh cities on our list scored much lower than average. Outside of these areas, scores were distributed more evenly around the country.
| CITY | MOST POPULAR JEWELLERY TYPE |
|---|---|
| LONDON | PEARL NECKLACE |
| BIRMINGHAM | DIAMOND RING |
| MANCHESTER | PEARL NECKLACE |
| NEWCASTLE | CHAIN |
| GLASGOW | CHARM BRACELET |
OUT OF THE BOX
The Most Popular Jewellery Item in the UK
It’s clear, the classic pearl necklace is by far the most popular item of jewellery in the UK. This timeless and elegant item was chosen by 17 of our towns and cities as their favourite piece of jewellery.
In second place, came the classic gold necklace, which was favoured by 8 of 40 cities. While third on our list of popular jewellery types was the simple chain.
We found some outliers in our data too. Glasgow was the only city to select a charm bracelet as their favourite item, and the data suggests that a silver and aquamarine charm bracelet would make an ideal gift here.
Another solitary pick was a gold chain, which was favourite to only one city, Blackpool.
Kingston upon Hull and Plymouth, both cities with strong seafaring legacies, chose septum piercings as their jewellery item of choice.
Most Popular Jewellery Item in the UK
Jewellery is nothing without jewels, so, of course, we looked at the most popular gemstones around the country.
Starting with the traditional precious gemstones of diamonds, emeralds, rubies and sapphires. We found Manchester favoured diamonds most of all, followed by Birmingham and Leeds. Newcastle ranked emeralds and rubies equally high, above every other town and city, while sapphires were the preferred choice for Coventry.
Coventry’s appearance is notable here because the city did not rank any other item of jewellery, metal or gemstone particularly well, but the people of Coventry certainly appear to have a clear preference for sapphires.
Newcastle again awarded top scores to most of the semi-precious gemstones, including aquamarine, opal, moissanite, and pearls. The exceptions here were Sutton, which ranked garnets in first place; with Newcastle ranking garnets second. Norwich showed a clear preference for peridot over emeralds, and Crawley has more love for turquoise than any other stone.
FIND A GEM
The Most Popular Gemstones in the UK
| GEMSTONE | Average UK searches over 12 months |
|---|---|
| DIAMOND | 48,330 |
| PEARL | 42,240 |
| Emerald | 16,240 |
| Sapphire | 11,990 |
| Opal | 10,030 |
Most Diamond-Obsessed Cities in the UK
| GEMSTONE | OVERALL SCORE OUT OF 100 |
|---|---|
| MANCHESTER | 100.00 |
| BIRMINGHAM | 90.50 |
| Leeds | 87.28 |
| NEWCASTLE | 85.02 |
| BRADFORD | 64.90 |
Most Popular Metals for Jewellery in the UK
When it comes to precious metals, gold is the most popular choice across the country. Gold’s characteristic warmth, malleability and resistance to tarnishing have long made it a premier choice of jewellery makers around the world.
According to our research, Manchester favours gold more than any other city in the UK, followed by Leeds and Newcastle.
Silver is another enduring precious metal with a timeless appeal in jewellery crafting. Newcastle ranked silver in first place in our data, with Manchester and Leeds close behind.
Newcastle also ranked platinum higher than any other city. Portsmouth scored in second place for this metal, and Aberdeen third.
Among non-precious metals, copper was ranked first by Newcastle, followed by Swindon and Portsmouth. While stainless steel was the first choice of Crawley, and Pewter was the most-loved metal in Swindon.
HEAVY METALS
The Most Popular Metals for Jewellery in the UK
| METAL | Average UK searches over 12 months |
|---|---|
| GOLD | 95,580 |
| SILVER | 61,430 |
| PLATINUM | 5,760 |
| STAINLESS STEEL | 4,970 |
| COPPER | 4,950 |
Most Gold-Obsessed Cities in the UK
| CITY | Overall Score out of 100 |
|---|---|
| MANCHESTER | 100.00 |
| LEEDS | 93.14 |
| NEWCASTLE | 89.90 |
| BIRMINGHAM | 84.13 |
| BRADFORD | 59.42 |
Overall Scores
The table below shows the top 20 UK cities and towns ranked in terms of their overall jewellery obsession. This is the greatest number of searches for each jewellery item, metal, and gemstone when equalised by population.
| CITY | Overall Score out of 100 |
|---|---|
| Newcastle | 93.92 |
| Manchester | 87.13 |
| Leeds | 84.71 |
| Birmingham | 74.91 |
| Edinburgh | 57.68 |
| Glasgow | 51.73 |
| Coventry | 50.38 |
| Bradford | 47.79 |
| Norwich | 45.67 |
| London | 45.26 |
| CITY | Overall Score out of 100 |
|---|---|
| Portsmouth | 45.16 |
| Aberdeen | 44.85 |
| Bristol | 44.65 |
| Swindon | 42.70 |
| Wolverhampton | 41.91 |
| Milton Keynes | 41.35 |
| Nottingham | 41.12 |
| Belfast | 39.99 |
| Northampton | 39.26 |
| Derby | 35.10 |
Methodology
To collate our findings, we began by establishing a list of keywords based on metals, gemstones, and styles of jewellery. We examined search data from Google across the largest 40 towns and cities in the UK by population, counting the number of times these terms were searched in each location.
Additionally, we looked at how often luxury items appeared in our results. We defined ‘luxury’ as precious metals and gemstones, i.e. gold, platinum, diamond, emerald, sapphire, and ruby. Our luxury score was the average score of each of these items.
This allowed us to extract each specific term and allocate it a score across the UK. Pulling this data out enabled us to see the difference between searches for terms such as ‘rings’ and ‘luxury rings’.
In all cases, we then equalised these searches per 100,000 population to account for the different populations of each town or city. Without this important step, the most populous cities, like London, would have dominated the findings of smaller towns such as Swindon.
We were able to calculate a score for each type of metal and gemstone in each town. By totalling these we can determine the most popular items within each state and across the country.
Finally, to measure the popularity of the different types of jewellery, we examined the search volumes again. Where towns appeared to favour different items equally, we studied the year-on-year trends to find the most popular.
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