Aigrette

Aigrettes, studded with diamonds and rubies, decorated the turbans of Ottoman sultans or the ceremonial chamfron of their horses.

[1] Jewelled aigrettes and "diamond feathers" worn at the English court of James VI and I and Anne of Denmark are associated with the goldsmith Arnold Lulls whose book of designs still survives.

[2] During the late 19th and early 20th centuries a fad in women's fashion for wearing extravagant and fanciful aigrettes resulted in large numbers of egrets and other birds being slaughtered by plume hunters for the millinery industry, until public reaction and government intervention caused the fad to end and demand for such plumes collapse.

The 61.50 carat (12.3 g) whiskey-coloured diamond, "The Eye of the Tiger", was mounted by Cartier in a turban aigrette for the Jam Sahib or Maharajah of Nawanagar in 1934.

[4] By analogy the word is used in various sciences for feathery excrescences of like appearance, as for the tufts on the heads of insects, the feathery down of the dandelion, the luminous rays at the end of electrified bodies, or the luminous rays—seen in solar eclipses—diverging from the moon's edge.