A Peek Inside Tiffany & Co.’s Whimsical Blue Book 2026: Hidden Garden Collection

There are brooches. And then there’s a brooch with a platinum and 18-karat-gold bejewelled bird of paradise perched atop a mesmerizing 25-carat fire opal—no ordinary pin. It’s no wonder, then, that it was the first piece to be purchased from this year’s Blue Book collection from Tiffany & Co.

Blue Book is the brand’s annual high-jewellery collection and a showcase of its finest techniques, which use the very best precious gemstones found anywhere in the world. Each piece is one of one and the triumphant result of years of imagination and craftsmanship. Due to the rare nature of high jewellery, the pieces are highly coveted; some clients even purchase them based on little more than an initial rendering. The collections are always themed, with this year’s centring around the idea of a hidden garden.

“It all starts with a mood board,” says Victoria Reynolds, the chief gemologist at Tiffany & Co., as she explains the creation process while we’re seated in a suite inside the Landmark—the brand’s tony Manhattan flagship. One floor below, the entire Blue Book collection is on display, framed by a seemingly infinite quantity of fresh flowers. Nathalie Verdeille, the brand’s senior vice-president and chief artistic officer, starts with an abstract vision—the colours and textures she’d like to evoke in the collection. The goal is always to honour the legacy established by the brand’s iconic jewellery designer Jean Schlumberger, who dreamed up whimsical, fanciful and nature-inspired designs that continue to resonate decades after his tenure.

Once the mood board is complete, it’s up to Reynolds and her team of gemologists to search the globe for the best stones to make Verdeille’s designs come to life. Reynolds explains that sometimes she will bring her findings back to New York or she and Verdeille will travel together, adding that the process is “rigorous” and starts three years before the final collection is revealed.

The first task is to source the primary stones, which feature prominently in a Blue Book piece—like, for example, the pink-meets-orange Padparadscha sapphires that appear on the butterfly pendant. “They were gorgeous, and we knew we had to do something monumental with them,” says Reynolds. The blush-hued stones make up the body of the butterfly and also dot its wings. Then come the secondary stones, which are sourced after a design is set. Reynolds and Verdeille were after blue sapphires to complement the pink stones. “It was a bit of a process to find the right tone because a sapphire that’s too dark can look inky and that wouldn’t light up the orange in the primary stones,” Reynolds explains. In the end, the team zeroed in on a set of Montana sapphires from the Tiffany vault that had a softer, dustier colour that was perfect for the final design.

That’s just one of many stories of the meticulous, months-long searches for Blue Book-worthy gems—a process made that much more complex due to Tiffany & Co.’s rigorous standards for unenhanced stones. Take emeralds, which have been oiled since the age of Cleopatra. “Emeralds are naturally very porous gemstones, so oiling them makes the inclusions a little less obvious and softens the stone,” says Reynolds. That won’t do for Tiffany. “You only see the beauty of the crystal.”

In the Twin Bud collection, a set of earrings features unenhanced Musakashi emeralds sourced from Zambia. “The crystals are a very beautiful, pure green, but they tend to be a bit brighter because of the iron that’s found in Zambian emeralds,” Reynolds explains. The stones were cut into a faceted pear shape, but the design also called for two matching cabochons in the exact same shade of green.

“They were ridiculously hard to find; we ended up cutting the cabochons from the same emerald rough so that they matched. But look at the end result!”

Indeed, the two high-domed cabochons look like perfect droplets of dew on a branch. Certain stones feel like a natural fit for the Hidden Garden theme—like the lavender-hued kunzites in the collection’s Jasmine chapter. “The ones that we selected were in this beautiful lilac colour. It’s like a lilac tree in the spring—a perfect balance between purple and pink, which is very hard to find,” says Reynolds. Seven of these rare stones appear in cushion cuts on a striking diamond- and-gold collar necklace, which evokes interlooping vines.

While the mark of high jewellery is the quality of the artistry and the undeniable rarity of the stones, another key attribute is what you can’t see: the finely finished back sides of necklaces and brooches, still adorned with precious stones and never left plain. “That’s 100 percent Nathalie,” says Reynolds.

Another facet of Verdeille’s genius? “She has a very distinct opinion about colour, and it’s very good—she has an incredible ability to couple things that are unexpected together,” says Reynolds. In other words, Verdeille doesn’t make the gemologist’s job easy. “But I like that it’s not easy,” Reynolds continues, adding that she’s already in the process of sourcing stones for the 2029 collection. For now, we can linger a while longer in the Hidden Garden, where the beauty of nature sets the ultimate standard.