A Guide to Buying Engagement Rings
The Big Moment
A marriage proposal is a once in a lifetime opportunity to show love and affection for your intended. The atmosphere, the delivery, the emotion, all of these things are key elements in the perfect proposal. However, the part of a proposal that your fiancée will remember most is probably the part that she will see every day for the rest of her life–the ring. To a woman, the perfect engagement ring is incredibly important. Women dream about engagement rings from the time that they are mere school girls. She will be showing her family and friends an engagement ring for many years, so you want to make sure that it is a token that she can be proud to show off. When you open up that little velvet box from down on bended knee, you want to ensure that her eyes will sparkle just as much as the stone. Because a ring is an investment in a commitment that will last a lifetime, it is important that the piece of jewellery will fit in with her sense of style. A timeless, beautiful, beloved ring is the goal of anyone who is looking to propose. This guide can help even the most lost and hopeless soul to achieve the goal of winning her heart with the tiny, sparkling reminder of your love for her.
The best way to choose an engagement ring might be to let your intended choose a ring herself. Bringing your girl engagement ring shopping can be a very fun and rewarding experience. This way, she is sure to get the ring that she has dreamed of for years. Allowing her to choose the ring is a method preferred by many couples, especially those in which the lady has very set, strong opinions about how she wants the ring to look.
However, bringing your intended along ring shopping can have unintended consequences. It ruins the element of surprise in an engagement if ring shopping is done ahead of time. If ring shopping to to be done after a proposal, the poor chap proposing will have no ring with which to stun his lady. And, of course, your girlfriend may assume that you have deeper pockets than you actually own. It is hard to turn down an expensive ring when her eyes dance at the sight of it. For these reasons, many men who are proposing choose to look for an engagement ring on their own.
Embarking on a path to find the perfect engagement ring can be a rough road to travel alone, though.
“What does she want?!?!” innumerable men moan as they wander aimlessly in front of row after row of glass cases in a seemingly endless jewellery store. Even the thought of such a situation is enough to make you cringe. You do not want to walk in without a clue as to what to look for in a ring. Often, women who are thinking about marriage will drop hints on their own. If she shows you a picture of a ring in a magazine, drags you over to the jewellery counter, or talks about the ring of a friend, she is dropping major hints about what she wants. If your gal is a little more subtle, she make take some coaxing. Give her a hypothetical situation or ask for advice for a “friend” who is ring shopping. Often, she will be more than accommodating in telling her exact opinion of what she thinks the perfect ring looks like. Remember, nobody matters more in choosing a ring than your intended. She is the one who will wear the ring for the rest of her life, so her beliefs about engagement rings are more important that any magazine trend or words of a pushy salesman. Think of her first.
The most major determination in picking out an engagement ring is probably price. We would all like to have an unlimited amount of money to spend as we wish. For most people, however, a budget is a huge consideration in the purchase of an engagement ring. Setting a budget before walking into a jeweller’s or searching on-line is a must in being able to have a firm estimate on how much you are willing to spend. The average price for an engagement ring is between 2.500 and 3.500 Euro, but if figures can extend both higher and lower than this. Decide what is reasonable to spend given your salary, how much you would like to spend on other aspects of a wedding, and how much your lady needs to be wowed. Often, a huge Hollywood ring is not as important as a thoughtful and beautiful ring within a realistic budget.
A setting refers to the collective shank and head of a ring, which work together to hold a stone. There are variety of different settings for rings.
The four prong setting is the most popular. Designed in 1886, the classic prong is perfect for solitaires in particular. A prong setting consists of three or more prongs holding up a stone, giving a stone the illusion of hanging. Prong settings are beautiful because they allow light to enter from many angles, giving a diamond a beautiful sparkle. There are several drawbacks to this popular setting, which include potential for prongs to scratch the wearer and bend, increasing the risk of losing a stone. To optimize this type of setting, it may be best to get a ring with six prongs instead of four. This will decrease risk of the diamond falling out.
The bar setting, a variation on the prong setting, uses elongated bars to grip the stone. These bars allow more light to enter than that of a bezel setting. A bezel setting is a band that wraps around a round stone to hold it securely in place. This setting, although allowing for less light, also makes a diamond look larger and is more secure than other styles. Bezels are less likely to snag or scratch. This type of setting is usually more expensive. Unlike a bezel setting, a flush setting does not involve metal that bends over the top of the stone. Instead, a flush setting creates a sleek, smooth surface for a diamond to sit within the band. This is a contemporary look which is highly favoured.
A tension setting utilizes a ring’s band to hold the stone in place. Small grooves in the setting give the diamond the illusion of floating in mid-air. Tension settings are expensive, as the must be sized individually. A less expensive setting option is the channel setting. Channel settings are ideal for both accent stones and rings that do not focus on a single larger diamond.
There are many other types of settings, including invisible, pave, cluster, and varied settings. Researching these options in detail and finding out exactly which setting to choose for your stone. Which brings us to our next point:
Carat, cut, colour, and clarity. Consider these the sacred words in choosing a stone for a ring. A carat is a unit of measurement equal to .02 grams. In short, the more carats a diamond is listed as having, the bigger it is and the more it costs. Cut refers to the style a diamond is shaped in during the fitting for a ring. Certain types of cuts are more valuable than others. Some example of cuts include rose, heart, step, and mixed. Consult a guide for cut specificity in choosing a ring for more information. Colour of a diamond is also important in choosing one for an engagement ring. Diamonds for engagement rings are traditionally a translucent white, but with the advent of lab created diamonds and an influx in the discovery of new sources of coloured diamonds has caused a shift in public demand. Clarity concerns the amount of blemishes and the internal visibility of the diamond. The clearer a diamond is, the more value it has. As with all aspects of choosing a ring, the choice of carat, cut, colour, and clarity is personal.
An engagement ring should fit well with a matching wedding band. Wedding bands have their own list of specifications to choose from and a good matching set can be ideal in the choice of an engagement ring.
Some Final Words About Engagement Rings
Engagement rings should be thought of as the first investment in a lifetime together. We wish you the best of luck in finding your investment in happiness, and even more in your proposal. Happy ring shopping!
Posted on April 5, 2011 by Admin