All of Taa's Comments + Replies

Let me give you some more immediately useful advice: a recommendation. The New York Diamond Center at 65 Broadway (ignore the big-sounding name, it's a small shop with an expert salesman) is where I bought both my engagement ring and our wedding bands. The salesman will provide useful and professional advice about the relationship between price, size, and quality. Importantly, he sells loose diamonds and orders the settings separately. You will get the GIA certificate from him for any diamond you buy. And then you also have your seller already picked out for wedding rings. Do try to get an understanding of your girlfriend's taste before going to pick out a ring and a setting. It should not be a surprise or a secret that you're planning to propose, so talk about her taste in jewelry, whether she would prefer a more traditional round cut or one of the other more unique cuts, band color and design, etc. Also get her finger sized somewhere--even within average ranges, her finger could be anywhere from a 7 to a 9. One important thing to remember on price is that it roughly scales with the square of the diamond's size in carats, so that a 1 carat diamond will probably be about 4 times the price of a 0.5 carat diamond. The guy I recommended will show you what diamonds of different quality look like so you can see what you're paying for. Note that you can and should insure your diamond on your renter's or homeowner's policy. Your insurance broker will want a copy of your receipt and your GIA certificate. One last tip, if you're planning to propose out of town and need to keep it hidden through airport security, sneakily transfer the box from your pocket to inside your shoe, and then back to your pocket on the other side of the scanner. And then make sure it's in the opposite pocket from your girlfriend on the flight so that the jewelry box digging into her hip doesn't give it away.

If you want to ensure she won't regret the choice, go shopping together! You will pay extra, as in you will pay more than the ring is worth. If you buy a diamond ring, turn around and try to sell it back, they'll give you something like 30% for it. Also, listen to this: http://freakonomics.com/2015/04/16/diamonds-are-a-marriage-counselors-best-friend-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/

Don't go to the diamond district. You'll just get a lot of high-pressure sales tactics and, likely, misleading information. Cubic zirconia? The main thing to be sure of is whether your GF is fine with that. If she is, just order a huge one online, they'll be cheap. Your price range for the complete ring or just for the stone? You can pick the stone and the design separately, that's common. Generally speaking, you need to figure out first if you want a natural diamond or a cubic zirconia stone -- that will greatly affect your budget, the stone size (and so the ring design), etc. Are you picking out the ring entirely on your own or you are consulting with your GF?

Biased: From Australia. Get an opal? or more general advice "consider other stones to diamonds". Gold is pretty; White gold is too (and cheaper) Bonus: Magnetic wedding band. neat, unusual, practical. (Disclaimer: I just purchased for testing out magnetic-sense https://www.supermagnetman.net ) My sister and her partner made their own wedding rings at a custom-wedding-ring-jewellery place, but I have no idea of the details.

Buy something with comparable resale value - a popular gem on a second hand jewellery item directly from the previous owner. Then, there is no need for her to regret anything cause she can sell it back if she needs to and possibly even profit.

Unless you are sure your GF really likes to follow social traditions this may not be the best idea... Our story: we avoided surprises and discussed thoroughly whether we want to spend a life together or not. It also included whether to go through the expense of a wedding or just live together. We concluded that a wedding is a nice thank-you ceremony to our parents, and besides the whole point is that we planned a child, otherwise we would just keep cohabiting, and she was afraid I could dump her into the difficult life of 35+ single moms later on so basically the wedding would be a way to promise in front of 50 relatives that I won't. She felt she would not risk having a child otherwise. Thankfully diamonds are not a tradition in our country (they cost more than what savings a young-ish man usually has, and getting into debt even BEFORE the wedding / setting up the new home sounds really dangerous). But gold rings are. Anyway she strictly forbidden me to buy a gold ring because we need to rent a bigger apartment with a proper child bedroom and buy new furniture so it makes more sense to blow our savings on that. She said a silver band €300 tops. So I waited a few weeks to achieve at least a surprise about the timing, waited for a national holiday that was about some big battles and said "This day we remember men who did brave things, so it is a good time for me to do something brave and..." :-) Later on, I had some of my inherited gold jewelry molten down for the actual wedding bands. As a decoration, we decided that we will write into each others rings to the outside what virtue we need to work on the most for us to be happy. I need to work on my patience and she needs to work on her courage i.e. actually accepting job promotions offered so we wrote these on the rings as reminders. Anyway this non-traditional approach worked pretty well for us, although it may feel a bit "coldly rational" and not too "romantic". What I would propose on a meta-level is finding out

If you're not familiar with the diamond industry, you may want to read Diamonds are Bullshit (or watch this less formal video. I don't mean for this to be offensive, but I've always disapproved of the idea of purchasing diamonds, especially for an engagement. There's a lot of abuse, fraud and mistreatment that happens throughout their production and distribution (then again, this is true for a lot of industries...). From a physical standpoint, it's x thousand dollars for a shiny rock (money that could have been used to do good). I get that people see it as a symbol of love and that it's reasonable to pay that amount of money for the symbolic meaning you get in return. I just find it odd that people derive such meaning, given the realities that exist beneath the surface.