In 1806, the Ottoman Sultan Selim III sent a small, diamond encrusted box decorated with his tughra to his newly recognized ally, Napoleon Bonaparte. Over the course of the next century, Ottoman sultans would continue the practice of gifting small, finely made boxes – often termed “snuffboxes,” enfiye kutusu, or tabatière – to foreign sovereigns and their diplomatic representatives. These tokens of diplomacy and friendship arrived at the courts of France, Britain, Russia, Prussia, Austria, and perhaps most surprising, at that of the recently crowned King Otto of independent Greece. In this paper, I argue that by analyzing the optics of this conspicuous gift-giving practice within its wider ceremonial context, we can better understand how these objects operated within the expanded Ottoman sphere. This analysis takes into consideration both the mutable material and dynamic social elements associated with this elite practice, viewing snuffboxes as symbolic nodes within a network of diplomatic alliances, personal friendships, and inter-imperial rivalries. This paper uses a combination of formal and text-based analyses to compare the visual, symbolic, and intrinsic value of individual items as they changed hands along political and diplomatic routes. This approach differs from previous studies, which have been limited to a discussion of the material qualities of snuffboxes and the specialized nature of their production techniques (including, for example, mid-nineteenth century advances in diamond-cutting and enamel-firing processes). This new approach casts these objects not as static, isolated, and immutable objects, but as works that could and often did change form (for example, acquiring new enamel, losing diamonds, becoming simpler or more elaborate) as they changed hands. The textual evidence for this paper includes archival sources as well as official and popular newspapers, the publication of which allowed descriptions of these gifts to reach a mass audience. Repetitive turns of phrase which functioned across languages and audiences developed to describe these once-ubiquitous boxes and the conditions of their official presentations. Formal similarities in phrasing across Ottoman and non-Ottoman newspapers reveal surprising parallels in how sovereigns used comparable strategies to style the representation of their power through gift giving. By highlighting the trend of sultans giving snuffboxes as diplomatic tokens, this paper opens new perspectives onto the interconnectedness of systems of the visualization of power in the nineteenth century.