Leave Princess Diana to turn a beauty emergency into a major fashion statement.

While Diana was touring Australia with then…Prince Charles in 1985, she made headlines on October 31 – 39 years ago! – after memorably wearing an emerald necklace as a headband. And it turns out the iconic style moment was the result of an accidental sunburn.

As stylist to the late Princess of Wales, Richard Dalton revealed in his new book, It’s all about the hair: my decade with Diana, Princess of Waleshe was in Melbourne with the princess when she had “a bit of sunburn around her neck from being in the hot Australian sun all day”.

Diana had planned to wear the emerald and diamond necklace – which once belonged to him Queen Mary and it was a wedding present from my mother-in-law Queen Elizabeth – at a gala that night. After hearing about her painful burns – which would have made the choker uncomfortable around her delicate neck – the stylist had another idea about how to wear the sparkly accessory.

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“This was a totally spontaneous moment where I thought, ‘What should we do for fun?'” Dalton wrote. He added: “I said to Diana, ‘Let’s try something different. Why don’t we put some emeralds in your hair?’”

Dalton used elastic from a pair of underwear to turn the choker into a headband. According to his book, out now, after he attached the elastic to each end of the necklace and draped it over the princess’s forehead, it “fit comfortably without falling out” and he styled her hair around it. “Diana absolutely loved it,” he continued. “And I’ve never traveled without panty elastic before.”

Although Dalton worked with Diana for years until 1985, he called the memorable “headband necklace” his “first big statement” in his book. “As they say, the rest is history.”

The necklace was not seen again until 25 years after Diana’s death when Kate Middleton surprised royal fashion watchers everywhere by wearing it (as a necklace) to the 2022 Earthshot Awards. And like her late mother-in-law, she paired it with a bright green dress.

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“I love the necklace,” Dalton wrote of the statement he spontaneously repurposed nearly four decades ago for Princess Diana in 1985. “I made such a sensation that night.”