Copper Fortune Geometric Wide Ring

A wide-band ring looks good and is fussy about the hand wearing it. Once the face is broad, bending the finger drives the band into the base of the palm, and you find yourself turning it every few steps. What makes the style work is the curve of the inner face: the inside cannot be straight, it has to be a gently domed arc that follows the base of the finger, and only then does bending stop pressing. The inner face here is curved, and turned over the rise is easy to see. Wear a wide band long enough and a shallow groove prints itself at the base of the finger. That is normal, and it fades overnight.

The name takes half of a four-character saying about fortune turning when its hour arrives. The name is plain, and the pattern is plain with it: a single diagonal on the face driving from lower left to upper right, folding twice and closing at the edge. There is no other ornament; everything rides on the direction of that line. Geometric work goes stiff when it is badly done, and the angles of the folds here are deliberate. Lay the line too flat and it goes slack; make it too steep and it turns restless.

What a wide face fears most is thin at the edges and thick in the middle. When the metal does not flow evenly, the casting comes out high on one side and low on the other, and after polishing the profile is visibly crooked. This face is flat: lay a straightedge across it and no light passes. The sides are chamfered, so the finger finds a clear change of plane without a cutting edge. The face is broad enough that the folded line can hold its own instead of looking crammed into a small patch at the centre. The final polish takes two extra passes along that line, so line and ground separate into light and dark.

One standard version only, with a fixed band size. Copper, unlike silver, cannot be hammered to a new size, so measure the finger properly. A wide band is harder to get over the knuckle than a narrow one, and the size has to be chosen for the knuckle rather than for the measurement at the base of the finger, or it will jam halfway on. If the finger is uneven in girth, go half a size larger. A little looseness still lets the ring turn, while a tight band makes the finger swell. Get the size right and a wide face actually makes the finger look straighter rather than shorter.

The green mark copper leaves shows up more on a wide face because more of it touches the skin. It is not a fault, and it washes off. Wide faces also collect fingerprints, one for every press, so wipe with a soft cloth in a single direction. Do not wear the ring to twist off a bottle cap or lift something heavy: a wide face takes the load, the corners lift, and once lifted they will not press back down. Store it flat rather than lying on its side under weight.