A milestone worth celebrating
18th Anniversary Gifts
Porcelain is both the traditional and the modern eighteenth anniversary gift, with turquoise as an alternative.
Celebrate the love behind the milestone with a real rose preserved in 24K gold, a lasting keepsake of eighteen years together.
The meaning behind your year
Gift ideas
Porcelain, Turquoise and Cat’s-Eye: Six Anniversary Gift Ideas
A few traditional, a few practical, and all of them better with a note attached.
Two cups from a local potter
Commission a pair of porcelain cups from a ceramicist near you, glazed in a colour from your wedding day or your first front door. Then use them for the morning coffee instead of keeping them in the cabinet.
Get the good china out
If the dinner set from your wedding is still in its boxes, unpack it and use it on an ordinary Tuesday. A chipped saucer with a story beats a perfect one wrapped in newspaper.
A plate-painting night
Hallmark suggests a pottery-painting class where you decorate your own plates. Paint one for each other, swap at the end, and agree in advance that neither of you is allowed to laugh.
Mend something with gold
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted with powdered gold, so the crack becomes part of the piece’s history. Book a workshop and bring the bowl you broke years ago but couldn’t bring yourselves to throw out.
Turquoise for joy
The ancient Egyptians called turquoise mefkat, a word that also meant joy and delight, and pieces from their tombs are among the world’s oldest jewellery. At 5 to 6 on the hardness scale it’s softer than most gems, so choose earrings or a pendant rather than an everyday ring.
Cat’s-eye, in golden yellow
GIA says the most sought-after cat’s-eye chrysoberyl is a semi-transparent golden yellow to slightly greenish or brownish yellow. Look for a smooth, domed stone with one sharp line of light running its full length.
The 24K gold-dipped rose
A gold rose to celebrate eighteen years together
A genuine rose preserved and finished in 24 karat gold over 60 steps and many months, then polished by hand. Each rose retains its individual shape and character, so no two are exactly alike—a lasting reminder of your first eighteen years together.
- Includes a certificate of authenticity
- Presented in a luxurious display case, inside a gloss white gift box bearing our debossed gold leaf logo
- A timeless symbol of love, preserved to keep forever
- Rose approximately 29 cm long; display case 34 cm long
What the 18th means
Why porcelain
for eighteen years?
Porcelain is the gift for an eighteenth wedding anniversary, on traditional and modern lists alike. It looks almost too fine to use, yet the heat of the kiln makes it hard and strong, a good match for a marriage that has just come of age.
Why porcelain
Fine, but fired hard
Porcelain is clay fired at somewhere between 1,200 and 1,400 degrees Celsius. At that heat it partly turns to glass, which gives it its strength and lets a thin cup glow when you hold it up to the light.
It also rings when you tap it, and its white surface shows off every brushstroke painted on it. Few materials are as pretty and as practical at once, which makes it an easy gift to use every day.
Where it began
Europe’s ‘white gold’
Porcelain was invented in China, where the craft had matured by about 800 CE. When it began arriving in Europe regularly in the sixteenth century, it was prized for its whiteness and translucency and known as ‘white gold’. In English it came to be called simply china.
For a long time no one in Europe could make true porcelain. Augustus the Strong of Saxony, who collected more than twenty thousand pieces from China and Japan, finally got the answer from a young chemist, Johann Friedrich Böttger, in 1708, and in 1710 moved his new factory into a clifftop castle at Meissen to keep the recipe secret.
Around the world
Turquoise, quartz and a skipped year
In France the eighteenth is the noces de turquoise, and Dutch lists give turquoise too. New Zealand’s Te Ara offers ‘turquoise or porcelain’, while Spanish lists choose quartz, the bodas de cuarzo.
Plenty of countries skip the year altogether. German and Italian lists have no eighteenth, and Japan’s list, which follows the British pattern, names every year up to the fifteenth and then only every fifth.
18th anniversary symbols
Porcelain, cat’s-eye and a flower of your own
Porcelain
Emily Post’s classic list and Debrett’s British list skip the eighteenth altogether. Porcelain comes from the fuller American lists, and Hallmark gives it as both the traditional and the modern gift.
Cat’s-eye chrysoberyl
Fine, needle-like inclusions inside the stone gather light into one bright band. Turn it slowly between two lamps and the band splits and closes again, which GIA compares to a cat blinking.
No set flower
No reliable list gives the eighteenth a flower, which leaves the choice to you. Find out what was in the wedding bouquet, or what grew by the door of your first flat, and put a bunch of it in a white jug.
Celebrating the 18th
Make a little time for the two of you
Cook the dinner you made in your first kitchen, put on the song from your wedding and dance in the lounge room, or take the long drive back to wherever you spent your honeymoon. Eighteen years gives you plenty to remember, and a good reason to make time for each other.
If you like a theme, bring out the good porcelain, the plates and cups that usually wait for visitors, and make your anniversary dinner the reason to use them.
Leave a note where they’ll find it first thing: in a coat pocket, the cutlery drawer or clipped to the dog’s lead. It doesn’t need to be long to be kept.
More romantic anniversary ideasWhat the 18th means to others
Letters that capture eighteen years
By eighteen years, most of what you say to each other is about lifts, bins and who’s getting the milk. A letter is a chance to say everything else, the things that don’t fit on the fridge whiteboard. Here are three to borrow from, and three real stories about porcelain and the eighteen-year mark.
Letters to inspire your own
We wrote these as examples. Borrow any line you like.
Dear Matt,
Eighteen years ago you dropped my ring during the vows and it rolled under the front pew. Your uncle Pete crawled after it in his good suit, and he still tells everyone he saved the wedding.
This year you taught Josh to drive in the Bunnings car park on Sunday mornings, went with Dad to every one of his appointments, and fixed the back gate I’d been ‘getting to’ since 2019. You didn’t mention any of it.
I still catch myself watching you make the school lunches, far too seriously, and thinking how lucky I got.
Happy anniversary. Hold on to me a bit tighter than you held that ring.
All my love,
Kate
Dear Anna,
When we married, you were twenty-four, I was twenty-six, and between us we owned one saucepan and a Corolla with no reverse gear. You said we’d manage, and for a whole year we parked facing downhill.
Eighteen years on we have more saucepans than cupboards, a teenager who borrows the car without asking, and a mortgage that will probably outlive the car. You still laugh at my jokes, and I know that takes effort.
The smartest thing I did at twenty-six was ask you. The best thing I do now is come home to you.
Happy anniversary. I’ve booked the place in Daylesford you keep sending me links to.
Love,
Chris
Dear us,
We’re writing this together at the kitchen table, which has taken forty minutes because one of us keeps fixing the other’s spelling. We won’t say who.
Eighteen years: two kids, three houses, one flooded laundry and a week in Bali where we both got sunburnt on the first day. We have argued about the heater in every one of those houses.
For the next eighteen we promise more weekends away, fewer phones at dinner, and that one of us will finally learn to reverse the trailer.
See you at the table.
Love,
Ben and Lou
Worth reading
Real stories and finds about the eighteen-year mark. Links open in a new tab.
To mark her eighteenth wedding anniversary, Amy listed eighteen facts about her wedding and marriage. She and her husband rode a vintage-style trolley from the church to the reception, wrote each other letters through a year apart while dating, and found the first year of marriage harder than they expected. Her best line could belong to anyone: she was ‘more excited about the marriage than the wedding’.
Mr and Mrs F. Harris of Sydney were holidaying at the Hotel Grande in Coolangatta when their eighteenth wedding anniversary came round, so they held a party and invited every guest in the hotel. A few locals joined in, and two of Mrs Harris’s uncles came along from Sydney to add a family touch. The rest of the column is a lively picture of the Twin Towns just after the war, from old-time dances and a statue dance to a ‘Popular Girl’ contest.
The Johnston Collection in East Melbourne looks at a pair of English porcelain figures from the Bow factory, made in the mid-1700s. The shepherd releases a bird into the air while the shepherdess holds an open birdcage, the eighteenth century’s take on single life versus marriage. Some pairs were made with the roles swapped, so the man holds the cage.
18th anniversary FAQ
