LONDON: Emma Watson has addressed speculation that she is engaged after being spotted wearing a diamond ring at Paris Fashion Week, telling podcaster Jay Shetty the piece is symbolic and part of a personal ritual rather than a conventional engagement.
Photographs from the Miu Miu catwalk show in Paris earlier this month showed Watson, 35, wearing a flower-shaped ring on her left ring finger, prompting widespread rumours about an engagement.
On the Jay Shetty podcast, Watson said the ring “represents different aspects” of her life and that friends had contributed petals to the piece as part of a private ritual. “Each of them brought one,” she told Shetty, according to the interview.
Watson added that the last seven years had been “an odyssey” and described the jewellery as “the most significant thing” because it symbolised the life she had built.
She also said she was in no rush to marry, quipping that she was “content not to be divorced yet,” and criticised societal pressure on women to marry by a certain age as “a form of violence and cruelty.”
Relationship and Studies
Media reports have linked Watson romantically to Kieran Brown, an Oxford student, and the actress has been widely reported to have paused her acting career to pursue higher education.
Watson began postgraduate studies in creative writing in 2023 and later transferred to a DPhil programme at the University of Oxford, according to press coverage.
Reaction to the Rumour Mill
The ring drew particular attention because Watson has occasionally shunned the trappings of celebrity.
At Paris Fashion Week she paired a blush-pink mini dress and tan suede jacket with minimal jewellery, making the ring a focal point in images that circulated online and in tabloid coverage.
Watson’s clarification on Shetty’s podcast sought to counter the narrative that the ring was an engagement symbol.
“It will either be part of my purpose here and my destiny, or it won’t,” she said on the programme when asked about marriage, urging that it was not something to be seen as an entitlement.
Watson rose to fame as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films and later stepped back from acting to focus on education and activism. She has been vocal about women’s rights and the pressures placed on women by social expectations.
