Gem-Encrusted

For the rich and nerdy.

Some things are so commonly studded with jewels that it's almost expected, like crowns, tiaras, and scepters, but these days some people will stick jewels on loads of things. Just look up "bling" on an image search.

On clothing, this easily makes Costume Porn. A Pimped-Out Dress is likely to have jewels sewn into the fabric. Tiaras and Imperial crowns even more.

Some instances of Crystal Skull are depicted as skulls with gems on them instead of being solid crystal.

This can include real gems or even plastic gems, which are often seen in girls' toys. Done with real diamonds, this is called Icing Out.

Compare Built with LEGO, Gold Makes Everything Shiny, Made O' Gold, Power Crystal, Symbol Motif Clothing. See Bling-Bling-BANG! for when this gets applied to firearms.

Not to be confused with the game Bejeweled.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• When Marie-Antoinette travels to France in The Rose of Versailles, she wears a Pimped-Out Dress that has ermine trim on the dress and cape, where the ermine is studded with jewelry.◊
• Quite a few things in The Five Star Stories, a manga absolutely infamous for its overly fancy Humongous Mecha that look like they either belong to classical nobility or particularly unsubtle gangsters.
• Meowzie's Poké Ball is encrusted with gems in Pokémon: The Original Series, highlight just how out of reach she is for a stray, street-living Meowth (who would become the villainous Meowth of Team Rocket).

Arts

• Damien Hirst's sculpture "For The Love Of God" is a skull encrusted with more than 8000 diamonds.

Comic Books

• Wonder Woman:
  • Wonder Woman (1942): Queen Atomia's sash is absolutely covered in gems and embroidery.
  • Wonder Woman and the Star Riders: Wonder Woman's cape has six large star shaped gems on it as well as a number of smaller sparkly bits. Purrsia's flying cat's mane/scarf is decked in a multitude of gems.

Fan Works

• Back to the Frollo: The sterling silver, amethyst-studded pager which doubles as a time-travel device.
• Dungeon Keeper Ami: In the Valuable Art chapter, a high priest of Crowned Death wears a "mask of rubies and amber".

Films — Animation

• Moana: Inspired by Maui's tattoos, Tamatoa has spent centuries covering himself in gold and jewels to make up for his otherwise rather plain shell.
• In Turning Red, Grandma Wu wears sunglasses with rhinestone-encrusted frames.

Films — Live-Action

• Played with in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The Holy Grail is the one not gem-encrusted. Thus, "the cup of a carpenter."
• The Wizard of Oz: The Ruby Slippers, which appear to be encrusted with rubies.
• Uncut Gems: Howard first tries to impress Kevin Garnett with diamond covered pendants modelled after Furbies.

Literature

• Chessmen of Mars: Gahan of Gathol wore a jewel-encrusted harness.
• Harry Potter
  • The Chamber of Secrets: The hilt of Godric Gryffindor's is described as "encrusted with rubies the size of eggs."
  • Goblet of Fire: Both the ancient chest holding the titular goblet and Rita Skeeter's glasses are decorated with jewels.
  • The Half-Blood Prince: For Christmas 1996, Molly Weasley gets a diamond-studded witch's hat from Fred and George (their joke shop business has REALLY taken off).
• Holes: The Warden wears boots studded with turquoise stones.
• The Hunger Games trilogy
  • The Hunger Games:
    • Glimmer and Marvel, the tributes from District 1, wear jewel-encrusted tunics during the Tribute Parade.
    • Katniss's dress for her interview is covered in gems wrought into flame designs.
  • Catching Fire:
    • On the Victory Tour, Katniss wears a blue velvet dress sewn with diamonds in District 2.
    • Seen in two of Katniss' prospective wedding dresses; one covered with diamonds and the other with pearls.
• The Inheritance Cycle: Inverted. Although the swords of dragon riders each have a gemstone set in the pommel as a means of storing magical energy, the elven smith Rhunön - who forged all the riders’ swords - disapproves of excessive adornment.
  Rhunön: “A sword that could not fulfill its function would be ugly to my eyes no matter how fair its shape, not even if it were adorned with the finest jewels and the most intricate engraving.”
• The Maltese Falcon: The eponymous Macguffin (and its real-life inspiration, the Kniphausen Hawk) is a gem-covered statue of a falcon that was later covered with black enamel to hide its value.
• The Nutcracker: E. T. A. Hoffmann was very, very fond of this trope.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: As with many aspects of 'Southron' culture (i.e. mainstream Westerosi or Andal-influenced culture), the North plays things rather differently. The ancient crown of the Kings of Winter - which Torrhen Stark surrendered to Aegon Targaryen during the Conquest - inverts this trope by consisting of a bronze circlet decorated with iron spikes shaped like swords. Unlike some crowns of southern Westeros, no jewels are featured, as bronze and iron are considered the materials of war. When he is declared the first King in the North in centuries, Robb Stark has a similar crown made to indicate his status.
• The Summer Queen: Chapter 12 opens with Eleanor of Aquitaine having her younger sister Petronella fitted for some new dresses, to celebrate the feast day of her namesake saint. One of these dresses is decorated with hundreds of pearls (apparently enough to endow a convent, according to Eleanor's disapproving mother-in-law Adelaide of Maurienne).
• The Tamuli: While it is not, strictly, gem-encrusted, the city of Matherion, capital city of the Tamul Empire, is covered in nacre tiles. The end result is that the Empire gets a major economic crisis every time there's a large storm in Matherion.
• Tolkien's Legendarium
  • The History of Middle-earth: The house of the Heavenly Arch, one of the twelve kindreds of the Elven city of Gondolin, had this in spades: Their weapons were set with jewels, each of their helmets contained a large opal, and their shields were emblazoned with a rainbow arrangement of gems (rubies, amethysts, sapphires, emeralds, chrysoprases, topazes, and amber).
  • The Hobbit: Smaug the dragon has his belly covered with precious jewels from lying immobile for years on a mound of treasure, neatly making him immune to the standard dragon weak spot... except for the conspicuously bare patch on his left breast.
    • Orcrist and Glamdring are described as having plenty of gemstones set all over in their hilts.
  • The Lord of the Rings: Eärendil, as described in the poem Eärendilinwë, recited and composed by Bilbo Baggins
  ...With gems was wreathed his helmet tall...
• The Tower of the Elephant: The title tower in this Conan the Barbarian story. Conan (who is young at this point) is rather dazzled by it; only the Old Master thief Taurus gets him to go on, for the Mineral MacGuffin.
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: Downplayed with the Golden Cap, which has "a circle of sparkling diamonds and red rubies running around its solid gold brim".

Live-Action TV

• Manages to be an important plot point in an episode of Merlin in which Merlin is suffering from a range of visions that prophesy that Morgana will try to kill the king. One of them is of her unsheathing a gem-encrusted dagger, and it's through Merlin's indirect intervention that Arthur swaps a very plain dagger (that he was originally going to give Morgana for her birthday) with the gem-covered murder weapon from Merlin's vision.

Music

• "Weird Al" Yankovic plays this for laughs in "Don't Download This Song" with mention of a diamond-studded swimming pool.
• Ubiquitous in Lady Gaga's videos - in "Bad Romance" she wears gem encrusted stiletto heels with one of her costumes.
• The cover of Aryia's "The Gun Song EP" has a bedazzled gun on it.
• Paul Simon wants you to know that she's got diamonds on the soles of her shoes.
• Britney Spears has an outfit in her Femme Fatale tour for I Wanna Go with short jeans that are extremely gemmy and shiny. She also wears many shiny body suits.
• Frank Zappa farming dental floss in "Montana":
  With a pair of heavy-duty
  Zircon-encrusted tweezers in my hand
  Every other wrangler would say
  I was mighty grand
• Soulja Boy once commissioned a necklace that featured a functional RC car covered in diamonds, showed off in his documentary.
• Another rapper example, Plies have quite a few of these, including a diamond-encrusted Florida license plate, snapback, and a clothing iron.

Pinballs

• The Mata Hari pinball shows the infamous spy wearing a Chainmail Bikini encrusted with rubies.
• Jersey Jack Pinball's The Wizard of Oz measures player progress with rubies, emeralds, and diamonds.

Pro Wrestling

• The original blingtastic wrestling title has to be Ted Dibiase's Million Dollar Championship.◊ Gold plated and covered with cubic zirconia, with three real diamonds on the inside, it cost a legitimate $125,000.
• Pretty much all of Prince Nana's attire since 2002 that isn't a business suit, except for that period in 2008 where he lost all his riches and was begging Ring of Honor to rehire him.
• The WWE Championship got a redesign right after WrestleMania 20 to fit this due to the title being won by John Cena. Take a look.◊ The title has over 3000 diamonds and a spinner (that hasn't actually spun since 2007) and looked tackier and tackier every year. The redesign is probably as big a cause of X-Pac Heat as Cena himself.
• Mercedes Martinez has a set of ring gear encrusted with gems in the shape of a skull and crossbones.

Tabletop Games

• The design aesthetic of Warhammer's High Elves involves quite a lot of this, with their armour and weaponry tending to have dozens of cabochon gemstones embedded into surfaces, as well as a profusion of jeweled bracelets, crowns and belts. The higher-ranking High Elf models can have anything up to forty such stones sculpted on, and even the lowliest rank and file troopers tend to at least have three or four (most commonly on matched pairs of bracelets or vambraces, one on the brow on a helm or circlet and one adorning a metal belt or sash).
• Warhammer 40,000's Eldar are, if anything, even more gem-encrusted than their High Elf fantasy counterparts, though the cabochon gemstone shapes on the models can just as easily be painted as blisters in the high-tech plastics they build in. The gemstones are not all decorative, however, as psychically-attuned spirit stones play a huge role in Craftworld Eldar society — providing their souls succor from the predations of a thirsting god when they die. As such many of the gemstones in Eldar technology contain the souls of departed Eldar to control the devices.

Video Games

• The MacGuffin in 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is a diamond-encrusted skull, offered to Curtis Jackson III by the concert promoter as collateral for the $10,000,000 fee he's unable to pay.
• In the Army of Two series, weapons can be gold plated and diamond encrusted, including grenades. A diamond encrusted frag grenade would actually be good, if a bit expensive.
• In Dwarf Fortress, you can decorate almost anything with gems/metal/bone/whatever to make it more valuable. Extra points for decorating arrows/crossbow bolts.
• One "camo" scheme available for gear in Call of Duty: Black Ops II is Diamond, which is exactly what it sounds like, and looks as ridiculous as you'd think. Of course, given the incredibly difficult requirements for unlocking it, it's really more of a Bragging Rights Reward than a legitimate camouflage option.
• Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell has the Diamond Sting Submachine gun, a gold-plated SMG with diamond inserts. Naturally, it's the weapon that represents Greed.
• The 9th anniversary event for PAYDAY 2 introduced the "9 Lives" and "900 Degrees Fahrenheit" masks and the "Magic Touch" gloves which are all covered in supposedly real south African diamonds.

Web Originals

• GQ magazine's youtube channel features a series where various collectors of jewelry (mostly rappers) showcase their collection taking care to highlight their most ridiculous pieces. Slick Rick gets a laugh from showing off a watch that he had covered in real diamonds, but admits was actually a fake Cartier watch.

Western Animation

• The Merch for the Disney Princesses often have this on their dresses, and even their fur capes.
• In Goldie Gold and Action Jack, Goldie had a diamond encrusted nail clipper.
• When The Simpsons went to Africa they met a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Jane Goodall, who was using the chimps she was ostensibly studying to mine diamonds for her. She had diamonds Hidden in Plain Sight everywhere, even on the bottoms of her shoes (a Shout-Out to the song "Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes")
  • Also, Homer himself in one of his imagine spots in addition to being plated in solid gold. And 50 foot tall.
  • There was also the self-help guru who had a watch so encrusted with jewels that the hands couldn't even move.
• In 12 oz. Mouse, Rectangular Businessman goes shopping for a harmonica dipped in gold and encrusted with jewels, then dipped in gold again and encrusted with another layer of jewels.
• In an episode of Spongebob Squarepants, Squilliam Fancyson shows off his "jewel-encrusted toilet paper holder."
• Mordecai and Rigby from Regular Show had to order tickets for a rock concert decorated with diamonds.
• Rarity The Fashionista pony from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic loves to include gems in her fashion designs and even has a bunch of gems as her Cutie Mark. She can easily find enough gems for her outfits since her special unicorn magic detects gems with ease. She once created a dragon costume and encrusted it with gems, presumably to mimic the effect of a dragon sleeping on a hoard of treasure, but it only made the Paper-Thin Disguise all the more obvious. Luckily, the actual dragons don't question it because one of them, an oddball named Crackle, just so happens to look identical to the costume, gems and all.
• Gravity Falls: In "The Hand That Rocks the Mabel" Mabel managed to "successfully bezazzle [her] face". In The Stinger for that episode, she bezazzles Soos and briefly uses him as a human disco ball.
• Vanity in The Smurfs (1981) episode "The Big Nose Dilemma" gets a new nose that looks like a Faberge egg sitting on his face.
• One episode of Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends has Bloo (who, in the episode, has become a baking tycoon due to selling cookies) ask for a pizza with a jewel-encrusted crust. How he expected to eat it, one only can guess.
• American Dad! has a recurring subplot about Roger's golden, gem-encrusted turd, which causes anyone who looks at it to become consumed with deadly greed.
• In Metalocalypse, Muderface buys a lethal "diamond-encrusted, titanium-based" codpiece. It's later given to midget Klokateer 216 as a raffle prize.

Real Life

• Cellphone accessories often come this way.
  • In Japan, "decoden" ("decorated cellphone") mostly means adding a thick layer of Swarowski crystals and/or random crud like fake roses or tiny plastic desserts to your cellphone.
  • Nokia's sister company, Vertu, makes cellphones of this sort.
• There is apparently now a Real Life trend of "Vajazzling"- which is supposedly "bedazzling" one's vagina. But that's a misnomer, due to the practicalities of doing that to either the labia or the vaginal lining (the latter being the true vagina in medical terms). The gems are actually glued on to the region of skin over the pubic bone. The term appears to have been popularized during a 2010 Lopez Tonight interview with Jennifer Love Hewitt, in which Hewitt encouraged her female fans to "vajazzle their vajayjays."
• Many Crown Jewels are gem-encrusted. The effect would be much the same if they'd been spray-painted with glitter.
• The bejeweled ermine dress in The Rose of Versailles is heavily based on this dress worn by Marie Leszczynska, wife of Louis XV.◊ There are several other paintings of royal ladies with dresses trimmed with furs studded with jewels. Although some could have been embellishments by the painters.
• Once commonly done with weapons including ones actually meant to be taken into battle. This sort of thing was the mark of the Proud Warrior Race tradition that had aristocrats who wanted custom weapons. Modern armies are more interested in killing people efficiently and you can (usually) do that better by issuing more cheap weapons to more people than with the expense of a decorated one. For similar reasons, Greeks and Romans played down that sort of thing.
  • Impractically showy weapons and combat uniforms get their own tropes, in fact.
• This car, owned by a 21-year-old Russian national studying business in London. "If you got it, flaunt it" indeed!
• The £1.7 million diamond studded iPhone. That's over 2.7 million US Dollars, and that's the latest in a line of them.
• Since 1952, the Jeweled Shillelagh is awarded to the winner of the annual Notre Dame-USC college football game; depending on the outcome, after each game an emerald-studded shamrock (for a Notre Dame win), a ruby-studded Trojan helmet (for a USC win), or a combined emblem (for a tie) is added.
• According to the other Wiki, during the execution of the Romanov family, three of the daughters survived for a short time because enough diamonds had been sewn into their clothes to act as armor.
• As mentioned above, rappers have the habit of having diamonds embedded into the strangest things to use as jewelry. The 2000's brought Grills, over-the-tooth jewelry that started first as gold front but soon also started having diamonds tacked on them, and in 2010, Lil Wayne upped the stakes by just having diamonds permanently fixed onto his teeth, a trend that others have also followed.

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