The Sapphire in Chanel's New Necklace Carries More Than a Lion's Head

Chanel's new Imprimé Lion necklace hangs its whole geometric arrangement of camellias, stars and sunrays off a single stone: a 20.66-carat sapphire from Sri Lanka, cut into an octagon and left unheated. That last detail matters more than it sounds. The vast majority of sapphires on the market today are heat-treated to deepen color and clear inclusions, a standard, disclosed practice in the trade. Stones that skip that step and still reach this size and clarity are rare enough that dealers price them at a premium, and jewelry houses tend to save them for pieces meant to be named individually rather than melted into a supporting role.

Sri Lanka's sapphire trade is also unusually artisanal for a stone this valuable. Most mining there runs through small, government-licensed pits rather than industrial operations, and no broad traceability certification, the kind Fairmined has built for gold, yet covers a meaningful share of Ceylon sapphire output. So a named-origin, unheated stone of this carat weight is as much a sourcing story as a design one: buyers are increasingly asking where a colored stone came from and how it was treated, and a house putting both facts in a press release is answering that question before it's asked.

The necklace belongs to Signes & Symboles, an roughly 85-piece high-jewelry collection built around four emblems Gabrielle Chanel kept close to her personally: the lion, her Leo zodiac sign; the camellia; the comet; and the sun. It is also the first full high-jewelry collection Chanel has released since Patrice Leguereau, who ran the house's Fine Jewelry Creation Studio for fifteen years, died in November 2024. According to WWD's reporting on the collection, the imprint-like juxtapositions of colored stones running through the Imprimés line trace back to Leguereau's own research notebooks from late 2023 and early 2024, sketches that paired stones the way a textile designer might pair fabrics.

Chanel left the studio director post empty for close to two years after Leguereau's death before naming Marie-Laure Cérède, previously of Cartier and, before that, fourteen years at Harry Winston, as his successor. Her appointment takes effect in October 2026, which puts Signes & Symboles in an odd position: a collection finished and shown before the person who will shape the next one has formally started. The house presented it, fittingly, at La Pausa, the Riviera villa Gabrielle Chanel built in the 1930s and that the house restored with architect Peter Marino after buying it back in 2015.

What survives from that notebook, in the end, is one stone with a paper trail: 20.66 carats, octagonal, Sri Lankan, untouched by heat, sitting under a lion's head that was somebody's last idea about what Chanel jewelry could look like.