Jan. 13, 2025

Nathalie Joseph, left, and Christel Jean-Pierre were scouting locations for a photo shoot in Washington Square Park on a Saturday in December when they caught my eye with their layered head gear.

Ms. Joseph, a 19-year-old model, had a black scarf draped over her camouflage baseball hat. Ms. Jean-Pierre, a 21-year-old model and aspiring director, had a striped reddish-orange beanie that recalled a tiger’s coat peeking out from beneath a green ribbed balaclava.

“I enjoy playing with colors and textures that reflect both my personality and the energy of the moment,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said when asked about her style. Ms. Joseph described the scarf atop her hat as “the cherry on top” of her outfit — and a way to keep warm without earmuffs. “It completes my look,” she said.

One of the biggest stories coming out of the Golden Globes, the first official red carpet event of the year, was not about an award snub or surprise, but rather an accessory on Zendaya’s left ring finger.

A week before, on Dec. 31, the pop star Dua Lipa posted a carousel on Instagram that included a photo of her holding a drink with a round cut diamond set on a chunky gold band on her left hand. (Her previous post was a rare pic of her canoodling with the actor Callum Turner. They first sparked romance rumors in January 2024.)

And on Jan. 1, the actress Chloë Grace Moretz posted a photo of what seemed to be her hand interlocked with that of her partner, the model Kate Harrison, both wearing diamond rings. Ms. Moretz has been very private about her relationship with Ms. Harrison, though the two fueled dating rumors in December 2018, when TMZ photographed them in Malibu.

None of these women have spoken publicly about an engagement — there was no flashy announcement nor confirmation. But that has not stopped the internet from going wild. Fan-made compilations and headlines citing confirmation from “anonymous sources close to the couple” swirled on the internet.

Can a celebrity ever just wear a ring on her ring finger without being hounded?

“Absolutely not,” said Moya Luckett, a media historian and professor of celebrity culture at N.Y.U. “We’ve gotten to a point now where everyone is so good at analyzing all these clues, including lots of red herrings. That’s something that just comes with the territory in a digital media age.”

From a public relations perspective, the speculation is not only expected, but desired. “If you’re a celebrity, the press should be talking about you,” said Anita Chatterjee, the founder of A-Game Public Relations, a firm based in New York. “I’d be worried if one of my clients wore something like that and there was no speculation.”

Zendaya, who was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for her role in “Challengers,” met her partner, Tom Holland, on the set of “Spider-Man: Homecoming” in 2016 as he was playing the superhero and she was co-starring as his love interest. They denied dating rumors for years, until paparazzi photos published by Page Six in July 2021 showed the two kissing in a car. The couple rarely share details about their relationship save for a few comments and social media posts.

Some have speculated that the ring was the work of the jewelry designer Jessica McCormack, who also designed an engagement ring for the actress Zoë Kravitz. On her website, Ms. McCormack has a ring similar to the one Zendaya flashed at the Golden Globes. Ann Grimmett, the vice president of merchandising at Jared Jeweler, said that the ring Zendaya wore appeared to be a five-karat old mine cut that costs around $120,000.

In the past year, Dr. Luckett said she had noticed that now, for many celebrities, “the luxury is to withhold yourself — you don’t want to be too available, and information shouldn’t be available.” It’s a way for celebrities to build mystique and differentiate themselves from quotidian influencers, she added.

“The key figure, in some ways, is Kylie Jenner,” Dr. Luckett said, “who has gone from being ubiquitous to sort of having this relationship with Timothée Chalamet that started off as, ‘Is it or isn’t it?’”

It is on trend for a celebrity couple to try to live their personal lives out of the public eye until they decide to throw their fans a bone — a tactic to control the narrative of their lives in the age of digital media.

“Today we have much more of this sort of citizen journalist ethos — everyone’s free to comment,” Dr. Luckett said, whereas before, “there was much more of an institutional structure where studios, management and the press all work together to control what information came out.”

Take, for example, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s engagements. For their first engagement in 2002, Ms. Lopez revealed the news in a television interview with Diane Sawyer in a media ecosystem where information came from the top. The second time around, Ms. Lopez made the reveal in a newsletter that she shared on social media.

According to Ms. Chatterjee, celebrities are careful about what they say when they do open up about their personal lives, and there’s a strategy behind each message.

“We want to control the messaging, and there’s a time for saying everything,” Ms. Chatterjee said. “You want to stay in the press. This could be a good way of hinting at it until she’s ready to talk about it, if she is really engaged.”

Representatives for Zendaya, Ms. Lipa and Ms. Moretz did not immediately respond to requests for comments. People magazine reported confirmation of Zendaya’s engagement from an undisclosed family source.

Not every celebrity is as reticent. A month ago, Selena Gomez took the route of the dramatic social media reveal, kicking off engagement season with an Instagram post flaunting her marquise diamond ring and a caption about her engagement to Benny Blanco, the record producer and songwriter.

The couple made an appearance at the Golden Globes. Ms. Gomez followed that as a guest on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” and her engagement came up several times. She seemed visibly uncomfortable, though, when Mr. Kimmel gave her a “daddy saddle” as an engagement gift.