Queen Máxima fell head over heels for the tiara from the Mellerio parure in 2006, with a total of 385 diamonds and rubies. Not only did it become her most worn headpiece ever, it is also a piece with a very special queen history.
Five queens (but actually six)
The Mellerio (named after Mellerio dits Meller, the French company that made it in 1888) was once bought by King Willem III for 160,000 guilders as a Christmas present for his second wife Queen Emma. And was then worn by all Dutch queens. So: Wilhelmina, Juliana, Beatrix, Máxima and… Amalia. Amalia? Yes. Our future queen was already allowed to test run once, and fortunately there is photo proof of that.
“I love tiaras”, said the princess in the book that Claudia de Breij wrote for Amalia’s 18th birthday. “Show me a tiara, and I’ll know where it came from. I can recognize all the tiaras in Europe.” The picture shows an eight-year-old Amalia who took the plunge in her mother’s dressing room during her mother’s preparations for the Luxembourg royal wedding in 2012.
The fence of the dam
Máxima herself experienced her first tiara moment in 2001, uncharacteristically early for a royal fiancé. After the wedding of the Norwegian Crown Prince Haakon and his Mette-Marit, mother-in-law Beatrix allowed her to borrow a stripped-down version of another famous Orange tiara, so that she wouldn’t stand out so soberly between the other royal bling.
But her beloved Mellerio (Máxima is fond of everything red anyway) she only put it on her head in 2006. After that it took another six years before she was spotted with it for the first time (at that Luxembourg wedding, in the years before it was invariably Queen Beatrix who was seen with it), but after 2012 the fence was also firmly off the dam . Máxima became queen and immediately pulled the Mellerio from the vault for her very first state portrait.
Not since 2019
Suddenly we saw the tiara regularly appearing, for example at several years of dinner for the Diplomatic Corps, at the wedding of the Swedish Prince Carl Philip and Sofia, during several state visits and in Japan, at the state banquet in honor of the inauguration of the new emperor. That was in 2019 and that is also the last time we saw Queen Máxima shine with the Mellerio tiara, so you would say that it is about time again.
Fortunately, the big royal events are well underway again, with Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee in early June as the first stunner, followed by the postponed 18th birthday party of Norwegian Princess Ingrid Alexandra (mid-June) and Queen Margrethe’s Golden Jubilee of Denmark (in September).
Numerous foreign royals are present on those occasions and the chance that Máxima will not use all three invitations is very small. Bring on that ruby splendor!