Saturday Night Live: Weekend Update anchor Colin Jost recently recounted how he spent a day dumpster diving in an effort to rescue a $400,000 diamond engagement ring that was accidentally thrown in the trash by his movie star wife, Scarlett Johansson.
Jost revealed his malodorous encounter with the not-so-glamorous side of The Big Apple while hosting an episode of Amazon Prime Video's Pop Culture Jeopardy!. During the segment, a contestant quipped about a lost engagement ring that was later found in a trash can at a bar.
That comment led the host to segue into a story about his own experience.
“My wife actually lost her engagement ring,” Jost revealed, adding that she believed she “accidentally threw it in the trash.”
And this was no ordinary engagement ring. The statement piece he gave her in 2019 featured an 11-carat, light brown, modified pear-shaped diamond designed to "float" on her finger adjacent to a brown ceramic band.
Jost told the Pop Culture Jeopardy! audience that he was determined to find the ring and picked through the trash of at least 12 New York City dumpsters. Still, he came up empty.
A dejected Jost returned home to report the bad news about the ring, but before he could say anything, his movie star wife coyly admitted, "Oops! It was in my pocket."
"It was a great day for me," he joked.
It was July of 2019, when the Internet got its first glimpse of Johansson’s unusual engagement ring. At the time, jewelry experts placed the ring’s value in the range of $200,000 to $450,000. The couple had gotten engaged in May of that year, but the ring didn't surface until Johansson’s appearance at the 2019 Comic-Con in San Diego.
Jewelry-industry pundits recognized the design by James Claude Taffin de Givenchy of New York-based Taffin Jewelry. The brand had shared what seemed to be an identical ring on its Instagram account in June of 2019.
The ring generated a buzz for a number of reasons. Not only was the light-brown hue unusual for an engagement diamond, but so was the egg shape — a mashup of the traditional pear and oval. What’s more, the claw-set diamond seemed to float on the finger, offset from the undulating ceramic and gold band.
Marion Fasel of the online jewelry publication The Adventurine reported that she got the chance to try on the now-famous Taffin ring in May of 2019.
Fasel wrote at the time, “If James de Givenchy is indeed responsible for Scarlett’s stunning engagement ring, a closer look at the jewel… could reveal it to be one of the most stylish and stunning any actress in Hollywood has ever worn.”
The 40-year-old actress and 42-year-old SNL star started dating in 2017 and were married in 2020. They share two children, three-year-old Cosmo and 10-year-old Rose Dorothy from Johansson's previous marriage to Romain Dauriac.
Credits: Couple photo by Canal22, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Ring image via Instagram.com/theadventurine.
