Engagement Ring

Choosing an Engagement Ring

After a very happy relationship of 6 years I have finally bitten the bullet and will be marrying my partner in July 2009. This mini blog takes us through from engagement and up to the wedding itself, hopefully giving other couples some helpful tips and advice along the way.

Having decided to propose to my partner I had to tackle the first major task - The engagement ring.

There are many schools of thought when it comes to the ring, in particular whether to have the engagement ring for the proposal, or whether to choose a less risky option.

As I see it the total number of options where:

Luckily I had a pretty good idea that my potential fiancé would probably like to given a traditional engagement ring, mostly due to her jokes that if anyone ‘were to propose' then she would ‘take the ring, get it valued, and then decide'. So no pressure there then.....

So the obvious choice for me was to propose with a ring, which takes me onto the next step - choosing an engagement ring that would be sufficiently impressive to get the desired "yes"

The choice of engagement rings is absolutely bewildering, with literally millions of different designs, choice of metals, choice and number of stones. To get started I decided to narrow things down by settling on the metal and the type of stone before moving on to the more difficult task of finding a good design.

Choice of engagement ring stones

The traditional engagement ring is set with one or more diamond stones, but in this day and age anything goes - diamonds, rubies, pearls, semi-precious stones, or no stones at all.

For me the choice was simple, my fiancé to be has always expressed a desire for diamonds, "big, big sparkly diamonds" to be precise, so that was that, it had to be diamonds. The choice then goes down to either a single diamond on a ring (a solitaire) or a number of smaller diamonds. I decided that a single diamond would have more of an impact if set properly.

Types of Diamonds

As soon as my mind was made up about diamonds I decided to research the topic properly. After reading several online articles I quickly discovered that there are 3 main aspects to a diamond, the 3 C's - Carat, Clarity, Colour and Cut. This excellent article gives a summary of these different aspects (http://www.hwgem.com/diascale.htm). I backed up my online research by going to some local jewellers and asking them to show me different examples of the spectrum of diamonds available. They were more than happy to help, especially the small local jewellers.

I'll briefly run through the 4 C's here are well, all of which have an impact on the cost of the diamond, basically the rarer the diamond is, the higher the cost!

Carat - The size of the diamond is measured in Carats, where 1 Carat is weighs 5 grams. The price of diamond increases rapidly, almost exponentially with size. i.e. a 1 Carat diamond costs far more than twice as much as a ½ Carat diamond, and a 0.1 Carat diamond can be picked up for only tens of pounds (on its own, no ring). In this case, size really does matter.

In my opinion a diamond smaller than 1/3 of a Carat is too small to be ‘suitable' for an engagement ring, whilst anything above 1 Carat is seriously prohibitively expensive.

Clarity - The measure of how ‘pure' the diamond is. Diamonds may have imperfections internally (called inclusions) or on the surface (called blemishes). The diamond is rated from ‘flawless' all the way through to heavily included, with a number of categories in between:

The diamonds are rated by inspection under a 10X microscope. Therefore even a diamond that has a number of inclusions may look perfect to the untrained naked eye. Again prices rise rapidly as you move up the scale towards flawlessness. From looking at a number of different grades of diamonds I can honestly say that I could hardly tell the difference between an S graded diamond and a VSS diamond. Only detailed inspection with the aid of a looking glass showed up any visible difference. I certainly couldn't tell the difference between a VS diamond and a Flawless one, under any circumstances. However the I graded diamonds were clearly flawed and had a very dull and fragmented look to them.

In my opinion a VS or S diamond will offer a good compromise between cost and quality.

Colour - Diamonds should ideally be completely colourless, looking clear and sparkling. The grading system ranges from ‘D' which is considered to be ideal and completely clear (don't ask me what happened to A,B and C?) hitting something like S which is a yellow colour, through to Z where the colours become rich and vibrant.

Again I was unable to tell the difference between the higher grade stones, everything from D to H looked exactly the same to me unless I studied it very carefully. Down towards M and O the difference was much more obvious with the diamonds taking on a definite yellow ‘off' tinge to them, I and J rated diamonds were just about noticeable as off-coloured, even when looked at on its own.

In my opinion a diamond coloured to F, G or H are indistinguishable from higher grade diamonds, and are certainly a lot cheaper.

Cut - Diamonds gain their natural sparkle due to an effect called ‘total internal reflection' where the light that hits them is reflected back out again. The diamond can be cut in a number of different ways to enhance this effect, taking all the light that enters hit and reflecting it back at many different angles, thus making the whole stone sparkle in the light. The grading system for different diamond cuts is:

 

I haven't been able to see a huge difference in price when it comes to the cut of a diamond, certainly when compared to the other factors discussed above.

In my opinion for an engagement ring either an Excellent or Good cut will provide a good sparkling ring

Final choice of Diamond

The combination of these 4 factors can be quite bewildering, and it is very hard to balance all the factors. There if no point buying a 2 Carat diamond if it is just an irregular, cloudy, yellow stone. Likewise there is no point buying a flawless, colourless diamond if it is so small that you can't see it!

Based on all the above factors the ideal diamond for me is one that is between 0.5 and 0.8 Carats, with a clarity of S or VS, a colour between F and H, and an Excellent cut. To me this should be a stunning diamond stone which doesn't cost the earth.

Engagement ring metals

Engagement rings come in a variety of metals (and even composite materials!) but the most common are - Platinum, white gold, and yellow gold.

Platinum offers a very hard wearing ring which polishes up extremely well giving a bright and eye catching ring to hold the stone. From my point of view the main perceived drawback of Platinum is that it is extremely expensive, costing 10-20 times as much as gold on an ounce by ounce basis.

Yellow Gold is plain standard gold, usually either 9 carat or 18 carat. The carat refers to how pure the gold is with 24 carat being pure gold. You may think therefore that 18 carat gold would make a better engagement ring as it is purer gold, BUT 18 carat gold is much softer than 9 carat gold which may cause some problems when it comes to setting and securely holding a stone over the years.

White gold is normal (yellow) gold  which is then electroplated in another metal. For rings this is usually nickel which gives it a white finish which looks somewhere between silver and platinum. White gold offers similar looks to platinum whilst being a lot cheaper, however over time the electroplating may wear off from the ring, requiring it to be re-plated occasionally (although this is quite cheap apparently)

Other metal - Engagement rings can be made out of pretty much any metal and even some non metallic materials. I saw titanium, rose gold, carbon fibre, and even granite engagement rings. However I considered all these to be too unconventional to consider further.

The choice of metal for me was quickly narrowed down to either White Gold or Platinum, for me the choice of going for a traditional diamond stone led me down this route. I felt that the silvery clean look of white gold or platinum would enhance the sparkle of the diamond stone. If I had plumbed for emeralds, rubies or some other coloured stone then I think I would have preferred the yellow tint of gold. But diamonds it was, and so it had to be a silvery metal.

The engagement ring design

I had narrowed down my search slightly by choosing an engagement ring made out of platinum or white gold and set with a single diamond. Armed with this I had the painful task of choosing an actual engagement ring. There are literally thousands of types of engagement ring design, and I won't discuss the intricacies of the designs here. Suffice to say I was looking for one that would show off the solitaire diamond in its best light, whilst being a simple and elegant design itself.

My first stop was the internet.

I did plenty of searches for internet based companies selling diamond engagement rings, and was impressed not only with the wide range available, but also the value for money that they offered, and the services that they provided (no quibble refund guarantees, resizing services, and all manner of advice on the types of stones and designs available). One of the most useful aspects of the online stores was that they allowed you to ‘build your own engagement ring' by building up from a basic ring design, adding you choice of metal, size, type and quality of stone etc. This allowed me to quickly understand how the different aspects of the engagement ring affected the cost.

It may be obvious but the type of stone had a biggest effect on price, the quality and the size having a huge impact on the bottom line. The design itself had minimal effect on the price, whilst the choice of metal was surprisingly insignificant as well. Platinum may well cost 20 times as much as Gold in its raw form, but engagement rings are actually made with quite a small amount of metal, and so the raw material costs doesn't have much of a knock on effect.

In the end I didn't purchase a ring from the internet, but that was only due to a successful shopping trip later on. I felt the internet shops offered extremely good value for money and had a number of procedures in place to ensure good customer satisfaction. At this point it is worth noting that before you make any purchase on the internet it is worth taking a few precautions, especially for a high value purchase like a diamond engagement ring.

Firstly make sure that the company is genuine, look for a fixed land line telephone number on the website and an address for their business. These can be quickly verified by looking at Company House to ensure that they are a proper registered company (www.companieshouse.gov.uk/info) and you can see how long they have been trading, if it is only a few months then you might have cause for concern.

Secondly do a search for the company on the web, simply typing the name into google will do. You'll quickly find some internet forums containing customer comments on the business, especially if there have been a number of problems.

Finally if you do go ahead with the purchase then you are best off using a credit card, this will offer you a certain amount of protection if there is a problem with the sale as the credit card company takes on some of the liability. Do ensure that you check with your credit card provider on the exact details of consumer protection that they offer.

Engagement Ring Sizing

Getting the size of the ring correct is a tricky task, especially if you are trying to keep the whole thing a surprise. I tried to getting the sizing right by comparing my fingers to my partners and opting for a ring that I thought would be suitable. Ultimately I proved to be out by a long way, but it didn't matter as they could easily resize it (it is worth checking this as some rings may be hard to resize).

Buying the  Diamond Engagement Ring

After all my careful research online and in the high street stores it was finally time to take the plunge and buy a ring! Exciting stuff! After all the careful research and consideration of the actual ring itself it struck me again why I was doing this. If all goes to plan then with this ring I'll be embarking on a whole new (long and happy) chapter in my life.

In the end I just visited a large number of jewellers and just looked at all their rings. A couple really stood out to me, they fitted my ideas discussed above and were really beautiful. One in particular was absolutely stunning and I just ‘knew' my partner would like it. It was slightly more expensive than I had hoped, but, well, its not often you make a proposal for marriage!

In the end you can do as much analysis as you like on the engagement ring, what stones to use, metals, design, quality, cost, everything, but nothing beats just looking and holding the ring and going with your gut feeling.

Next stop - proposing - wish me luck!

 

Please feel free to leave a comment about this page

Was this page useful? Do you have something to add? Do you disagree?

If your comments meet our guidelines then we will publish them (you do not need to register!)

Or why not tell a friend and email this page to someone