Who gets the gold circle?

The gold circle has no name of its own. Instagram named the whole award after it.

Rings is the prize, and the ring is the point. Since 29 October, 25 people have a gold circle around their profile picture whenever they post a Story, in place of the familiar coloured gradient. They also have a real ring, in a box. But the one most people will see is the one on the screen, and on a platform where being seen is how a lot of people pay their rent, that circle is worth more than the metal.

So it matters who gets it. Our view, which we'll argue below: the gold ring should go to the people who make things on Instagram, and only to them.

What Rings is

Instagram announced Rings on 6 October 2025: an annual award, a jury, and a physical object, which for a tech company is charmingly old-fashioned. The first ring was designed by Grace Wales Bonner. This year's, according to reports, is by Emily Adams Bode Aujla, a four-leaf clover in green Connemara marble. There is no prize money. CNBC put that in its headline in 2025, and it is still the first question anyone who earns a living online asks.

The 2026 jury has fourteen members: Donatella Versace, A$AP Rocky, Chloé Zhao, FINNEAS, Bode Aujla, the street artists OSGEMEOS, the skier Mikaela Shiffrin, the make-up artist Isamaya Ffrench, the chef Vikas Khanna, GQ's Will Welch, the YouTuber Jack Edwards, the choreographer Charm La'Donna, Eva Chen and Adam Mosseri.

The 2026 winners include the rapper Little Simz, the designer Salehe Bembury, the photographer Renell Medrano, the comedian Jordan Firstman, the model Bhavitha Mandava, Muhammed Riswan, a freestyle footballer from Kerala, and Erling Haaland.

Not the other circles

There are a lot of circles on Instagram now. The coloured ring means there's a Story you haven't seen. The blue tick is verification, which since 2023 you can also buy through Meta Verified. The badges viewers buy during a Live are tips, paid in public. The gold ring is the only one you can't apply for, buy or switch on. That is exactly why it carries weight.

How the winners are chosen

You can't enter. According to reporting on this year's edition, Instagram's creator teams draw up the nominations and the jury votes on the final 25. Instagram says follower count, engagement and industry don't decide eligibility. The criteria it names are originality, creative risk, craft and cultural impact.

We couldn't find how many people were nominated, how the criteria are weighted, how votes are counted, or how long the ring stays on a profile. That's normal for a young award. It's worth knowing when you read the list.

Why we'd keep the ring for creators

Look at who made this year's list. Renell Medrano and Salehe Bembury are people whose work lives in images and objects, and much of it reached the world through Instagram. Muhammed Riswan is the story the platform tells best: someone the feed found first and everyone else found second. These are creators in the full sense of the word. They film, edit, write, light, post, answer comments and do it again tomorrow, often without a team.

Then there's Haaland. He is extraordinary at football, and it's genuinely nice to see someone like him celebrated by a platform where so many fans follow him. But his fame was made on a pitch, and he is recognised for it everywhere, every week. A ring on his profile changes nothing about how the world sees him. A ring on a creator's profile can change everything.

That's the heart of it. For most public figures, Instagram is a window. For creators, it's the workshop. The hours are real: the shoot that didn't work, the edit at 2 a.m., the series that took four months to find its format. An award that sits on the platform where that work happens should recognise that work, and keep a space where creators don't have to compete for attention with the most famous people alive.

None of this means leaving public figures out. Instagram could give them their own honour, for the artists, athletes and designers who use the platform brilliantly, in a different colour or a different form. Recognition for both, confusion for neither. The gold ring would then mean one clear thing to anyone who sees it: this person made something here.

We'd add one more change, and it's a small one. Let the community nominate. Instagram's teams find what Instagram's systems surface, and those systems surface what is already working. A public nomination round, even a short one, would bring in the creators with 8,000 followers and an original eye, which is where the next decade of good work usually is.

What the list is useful for, if you work with creators

You don't need a ring winner to use Rings. Instagram has published, in human form, its own definition of a valuable creator, and you can borrow it.

Put the four criteria into your next creator brief: originality, creative risk, craft, and influence on other makers. Leave out the two the award can't help using, fame and fit with the platform's ambitions. Then look below the obvious accounts. The smallest account among the 2025 winners had about 109,000 followers, and many people who meet the criteria have a tenth of that. They are easier to reach, more likely to care about your product and often better at making things than accounts ten times their size.

That's slower than buying reach. It's also how you find people before anyone gives them a gold circle. We wrote more about choosing creators in Sorry, influencers. We want real opinions, and it's a large part of our creator marketing work.

The ring is gold. The best thing about it is that it can't be bought, so let's make sure it can't be borrowed either.