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Louis Vuitton photo

Try not to panic when a ring, like this Louis Vuitton one, gets stuck

Richard Branson

Mogul learned the hard way what not to do when a ring is stuck on your finger

At the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival, Richard Branson shared an amusing anecdote of how he wound up with Goldie Hawn’s ring stuck on his finger.

Branson told the tale as he was about to introduce Hawn’s daughter Kate Hudson at a luncheon to promote his Virgin Unite charity.

“Years ago, Goldie and I were having lunch and she had this enormous ring on her finger,” Branson recalled. “I admired it and she gave it to me to try on. And then I couldn’t get it off.”

The ring, Hudson later explained, was not Hawn’s engagement ring but a man’s diamond ring from India that had been given to her by Hudson’s father.

The more Branson struggled to remove the piece, the more jammed it became. “We tried everything,” he told the chuckling crowd. “The waiters brought margerine to rub on my finger but nothing worked. It wouldn’t budge.

“I had told my wife I was at a business dinner," Branson continued. "So I had some explaining to do when I went home with this enormous diamond ring on my finger.”

The next day, the ring was still trapped. “We had to go get it sawed off,” he told the gasping crowd.

When Greg Kwiat heard the story several days later in New York, he nodded as if he had been down that road before.

“Unfortunately, people panic and then they get nervous and their hands swell,” commented Kwiat, during a tour of the new Kwiat flagship boutique on Madison Ave.
“The best thing to do is put your hand in cold water,” he advises.

And try to relax.