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Unique and Unexpected Valentine’s Day Gift Ideas

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  • Post last modified:January 30, 2025

Welcome to the T List, a newsletter from the editors of T Magazine. Today, we’ve turned it into our Valentine’s Day gift guide, with recommendations on what to get your loved ones. Sign up here to find us in your inbox every Wednesday, along with monthly travel and beauty guides, and the latest stories from our print issues. You can always reach us at tmagazine@nytimes.com.

Something Old, Something New

Vintage Floral Jewelry, Reframed With Gemstones

Francesca Villa launched her jewelry brand in 2007 with pieces that incorporated Essex crystal work dating back to the Victorian era. A devoted collector, Villa scours auction houses, antique stores and flea markets around the world for jewels that she uses as the starting point for her creations. She has transformed vintage lenticulars into playful necklaces and turned antique cameos into reversible rings. For one of her recent collections, Garden Eden, Villa reimagined German intaglio flower resins from the 1950s to create an array of rings, pendants and earrings. Each piece is handcrafted in her atelier in Valenza, Italy, by master artisans and cast in 18-karat gold. Some resins have a bright enamel border, and all are surrounded by gemstones. A daffodil ring is lined with diamonds and sapphires in sunset shades, while pink pansy earrings are encircled by pink enamel as well as green peridots and tsavorites. Consider it a way to give a bouquet that never wilts.

Visual Feast

A Powdered Doughnut Dish and More Food-Shaped Tableware

If your sweetheart’s love language is cooking and entertaining, consider giving them a piece of trompe l’oeil tableware resembling a food item. The New York-based decoupage artist John Derian and the Parisian ceramics brand Astier de Villatte have collaborated on a handmade saucer that looks like an apple, perfect for presenting slices of fruit. For a leafy salad, there’s a radicchio serving bowl courtesy of the Brooklyn home goods store Porta, which is fired in a wood-burning furnace in Italy and painted with detailed leaves, inside and out. Those with a sweet tooth will get a kick out of a porcelain box shaped like a powdered doughnut from the Austrian company Augarten – it works well as a creative vessel for sugar or jam. The Portuguese pottery company Bordallo Pinheiro, which has specialized in humorous earthenware since 1884, offers a dragon fruit plate.

One Summer

One summer in high school, I attended a statewide residential program for gifted students. Participants were assigned a discipline of study based on an academic or artistic strength, and mine was math – deeply unglamorous to my 15-year-old self. To compensate, I took up smoking clove cigarettes with the drama kids. I fell for an actor named Lonny who was several inches shorter than me, with a cloud of brown curls. I thought of Lonny when I smelled the clove top notes in Gold Smoke, a rich, limited-edition perfume released by Régime des Fleurs just in time for Valentine’s Day. A number of brands offer more classic takes on tobacco-based fragrances, like Coqui Coqui, the perfumery and hotel company founded on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Its Tabaco eau de parfum, layered with verdant herbs and saddle leather, smells like a cowboy did a fresh load of laundry for you. The room diffuser would make a nice gift if choosing a perfume for your loved one is too intimidating. Santa Maria Novella’s Tabacco Toscano fragrance is another favorite, a truly unisex scent. The soap comes wrapped in a pretty box, and at $35 it’s an affordable option that still feels luxurious. I’ll give myself the candle version and burn it while listening to the Indigo Girls’ cover of “Romeo and Juliet” by Dire Straits – which I had on repeat while I was grounded by my RA for staying out past curfew with Lonny.

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