The Bling

Ok, enough of the schmaltzy stuff. This whole engagement thing has changed me somehow and I get spurts of emotional outpouring like that. Time to get down to business.

This post is all about the bling. The process that I went through is probably a little different than what most people go through, but the picking of the ring was the pretty much the same. My fiancee's family has a longtime friend that does jewelry on the side. He used to run a jewelry store with some friends, but had to close it and now just does it on the side. He has made rings for Girl's parents before and he gets them at huge discounts. That is the part of my process that was different. However, picking out the ring itself is the part that is pretty much always the same.

I knew that I wanted to propose shortly after our friends got married on Labor Day. I started casually looking at rings toward late September-early October. I started seriously looking toward the end of October. I had a few criteria to work with:

1) She likes round-cut better than princess
2) She likes the 3-stone settings with accents
3) I can only get a solitaire if it's Tiffany
4) WHITE GOLD ONLY!!

Well, ok. Personally, I like the look of the round-cut diamonds better too and the 3-stone settings are nice. Solitaires are too plain (she really only said the bit about Tiffany because she didn't want a solitaire). She also said she wanted it to be over 1 carat T.W. but that she didn't want it to be too big because she has small hands. It's actually a valid concern. If a girl with small hands has a giant rock on her finger, it doesn't look right. I was happy when she said this because size=money (that's what she said, literally).

So what I was targeting was a round-cut, 3-stone ring with accents, with total weight being between 1.5-2 carats. I found the perfect ring on a popular jewelers' website (withholding name):
This was it. This was the ring I wanted to get for her. It was perfect. Plus, this particular one was on sale. So I went to our family friend with this picture and said I wanted something like this. It was 1.5-carat T.W., white gold, had side stones and accents, the whole nine yards.

While he couldn't match the price, he was able to upgrade the quality of the stones considerably. He actually went to the store and looked at the ring and said "yep, the quality of the stones I have is much better than what is in this ring." He explained to me the whole process of obtaining stones and to make a long story short, the jewelry stores generally don't ask specifically to see each stone before picking them because it costs them extra. They will tell the diamond broker that they want a bunch of G color stones and they dump them out on the table for them. This increases the chances of getting a stone with a large flaw in it. The rating system also doesn't always take into account the flaws when rating the clarity. All 4 of the stones he showed me were the same clarity, despite the one having a giant flaw that spread throughout the entire stone.

Anyway, so I went over to his house to look at settings and loose stones. This is the part of the experience that you won't get by going to a chain jewelry store. He showed me about 5 settings altogether, two of which I liked. Then he showed me 4 different stones of varying size and color. The sizes were .5, .6, .7, and .84-carat. He showed me the stones in 10x magnification to show me the imperfections in each stone. The .5 and .7 stones were nearly flawless. The .6-carat, the size I liked the most, had a huge flaw in it and he said he would never recommend selling that stone to anyone. The .84 stone was a K color and looked yellow compared to the other stones when he did his color test for me.

Then the mountings. The two that I liked were both 3-stone settings with accents. The first was small, with total weight around .61. The second was much bigger, with total weight at .94 carats. The second one was dazzling even with no center stone in it. I liked it, but it was much more expensive. Well, I wanted a .6-carat center stone to make the whole thing around 1.5 carats. The .7 was too expensive and the .5 was too small. I said to him, "is there any way you can try to find another .6 that doesn't have a huge flaw in it?" Keep in mind, this is a week before I'm set to pop the question. He said he would see what he could do. He called me the next day and said he found a .6 stone that was nearly flawless, came in at E color (D is the best, colorless) and he could put it in the ring right away if I gave him the go-ahead. I did. And the ring turned out awesome. Here it is:

My advice: follow your fiancee's requirements as best you can because it's her ring and not yours. Make sure you set your budget so that there is some wiggle room (I went up about $800 from my original budget). In the end, you may need to make a judgment call. Oh, and it's nice to have friends that can give you a beautiful ring for almost half price.