Top 10 Most Extraordinary Faberge Easter Eggs in 2026

Made to mark Nicholas II's 1896 coronation, this egg wraps a gold surface in translucent yellow enamel radiating out from the center like sunbeams -- one of Faberge's most instantly recognizable finishes. Inside is the real showpiece: a tiny gold replica of the 18th-century coronation coach, barely 9 cm long, accurate down to the smallest detail. It's the egg most people picture when they picture a Faberge egg at all, and it earns that reputation on craftsmanship alone.

Carved from rock crystal to mimic ice, the Winter Egg trades Faberge's usual jewel-box density for something closer to a frozen still life -- a basket of spring flowers rendered in white quartz, gold, and garnet, set inside what looks like solid ice. That restraint is exactly why collectors rate it so highly: it's a showcase of the workshop's technical range as much as its taste for excess. When it came up at Christie's in 2002, it sold for $9.6 million, a record for any Faberge egg at auction at the time.

The Hen Egg started all of it. Tsar Alexander III commissioned it as an Easter gift for his wife, Maria Feodorovna, and it's deceptively plain from the outside -- a matte white enamel shell that gives no hint of what's inside. Crack it open and there's a golden yolk; inside that, a golden hen; and inside the hen, originally, a diamond miniature crown and a ruby pendant, each nested surprise smaller and more precious than the last. Every Imperial egg that followed, for the next three decades, was chasing the idea this one invented first.

This one commemorates an engineering feat with an engineering feat: open the egg and there's a miniature train, in gold and platinum, that actually runs -- five cars, diamond headlights, ruby taillights, wound by a key that folds flush into the egg itself when not in use. It's Faberge at its most literal-minded and its most impressive at the same time, turning the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway into a piece of jewelry you could, in theory, wind up and watch move.

Where most Imperial eggs lean toward density -- more gems, more gold, more surprise -- the Lilies of the Valley Egg works in the softer register of Art Nouveau: pale pink enamel dotted with pearl and diamond flowers. Turn the pearl button at the top and three miniature portraits rise into view -- Nicholas II and his two eldest daughters -- a mechanism as delicate as the flowers surrounding it. It's the egg most likely to be described as pretty rather than dazzling, and that's clearly what it was built to be.

Unusually, this egg wasn't made for the Romanovs at all -- it was commissioned as a gift for the Rothschild banking family, and it shows in the mechanism: a clock with an automaton rooster that pops up on the hour to crow, flap its wings, and nod, more novelty clock than religious keepsake. That crossover appeal is probably why it did so well at auction: it sold at Christie's in 2007 for $18.5 million, a record at the time for any Faberge piece. Collectors outside the usual Romanov-provenance crowd wanted this one specifically because it wasn't Imperial.

At 36 centimetres, this is the largest of all the Imperial eggs, and Faberge used the extra scale to attempt something closer to architecture than jewelry: a detailed replica of the Cathedral of the Assumption inside the Moscow Kremlin, golden domes and all, with a music box hidden inside that plays two Easter hymns. It's less a surprise-inside-a-shell than the earlier eggs and more a standalone sculpture that happens to open -- the most ambitious single object Faberge's workshop ever built for the Tsars.