Help finding an engagement ring

plasticbathmonki

plasticbathmonki

CAGiversary!
Well, after 5 years of dating the little lady, I'm going to take the plunge and ask her to marry me. But my inner cheap ass refuses to dish out money to some overpriced mall jeweler.

So now to the question: what's the best advice on where to buy a diamond ring you all have? I'm understand the whole color/cut/clarity jazz, but I have no idea where a good place to find one is.

On a related side note, I told her a long time ago that when we do get married, I want the Green Lantern symbol engraved on the outside of my ring.

Anyway, I appreciate any help you all can give.
 
Have you ever bought jewelry for your girlfriend before? If you've had a good experience with one place, I'd recommend trying them again.

As for myself, I've bought (once) from Shane Co., it was a Silver Heart necklace with a .25 carat diamond, lifetime warranty, and everything was perfect for the value ($100).

Here's their link if you choose to check them out: http://www.shaneco.com/default.aspx

Shane Co. tends to have jewelry ranging in a lot of styles and prices (including design your own ring), so you might consider looking there. But if you've never bought a ring for someone else before, first things first:

Find out the ring size for her ring finger.

In any case, congrats on getting this far, and I hope she doesn't read CAG!

~HotShotX
 
First of all, congratulations. Second, don't worry about your ring yet; you can go together to get that sorted out after you've popped the question. I'll assume that you have talked with your special someone about what she would like in a ring before, so I won't go into types or styles of rings.

However, I cannot stress enough what you said about staying away from mall stores. A good jewelery store will NEVER pressure you. They will let you leave and think about a purchase (they might let you know they won't hold a ring for you, but no pressure). In fact, I highly recommend leaving every store to "sleep" on your ring choice before buying, that way you can reflect on how much it will cost and you can see if they pass the "no pressure" test.

Listen to every store's sales pitch. Let them know that you are shopping for an engagement ring and that you don't know much about it. Better stores will go into detail about diamond certification and the three "C"s. If you listen to several stores pitches, you'll get a good idea about how to pick a ring/stone and you'll also get a good idea of which stores were not telling you everything.

A good jeweler will let you pick out the ring and the central diamond separately. The jeweler should offer to show you several diamonds of different quality and sizes in your price range and will offer to let you see them through a microscope. Stay far away from rings that already have the diamond in the ring. Also, stay far away from any store that rates their diamonds "in house". The diamonds should be certified by a well known and outside source.

Finally, if you can find it you want some sort of lifetime warranty and maintenance included with the ring.

All that being said, I'd look in moderately priced local shopping areas that are old-fashioned-down-town-styled for local jewelers that have been around for 30 years or so. If you can find a family owned store that's been around for generations then that's even better. It may be cliche, but look in your yellow pages for ads (probably the smaller ads). Ask your friends and family for recommendations too.

Good luck.
 
A really good forum to get advice in is pricescope.com. Even if you don't post, there's a lot of threads that cover general engagement ring advice and popular vendors, including online ones. One vendor for diamonds I hear about all the time is whiteflash.com. I think Blue Nile is supposed to be pretty good, too. For local jewelers, look at online reviews (like Yelp) and find stores that don't pressure you. I think all of what umcthomas said is pretty much true.
 
here is the ring I recently bought for my chick.

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my suggestion would be, ask local friends where to shop for one. My buddy from work told me where he got his and they were ultra-nice and hooked me up with a sweet deal.
 
I bought my wife's ring from a jewlery store, nothing fancy. However, I have a friend who's engagement ring for his fiance came from China. We work at a firework's place and the owners often have to go to China to check out the factories, etc. One of the guys who go buys a lot of jewelry from people he's come to know over there. Anyway, my friend ended up getting a diamond engagement ring valued over here at around $8,000-$10,000 for only a fraction of the price. It's been checked over here and is in fact a natural diamond.

So, I guess to summarize my story, get a friend who knows where to get jewelry in China.
 
For the love of God, don't buy a new one at an overpriced retail store. I went through Jared and went all out thinking I was only going to do it once.. things didn't work out and when I looked into selling it, I found that the "true" value (what I could realistically sell it for) was about 1/3 what I paid. I found a site called "IdonowIdont.com" that is geared for engagement ring/jewelry resale and I would feel safe doing business with them as a buyer since they request that you send your ring to them and they appraise it before sending it on to the buyer.

I got lucky and worked out a deal with a member here that was beneficial for me (just wanted to unload it) and him (got a great deal.. would have paid over 3x as much at a jewelry store for what he got), but I wouldn't overlook that there are a ton of people who just couldn't work things out or are selling legitimate jewelry for a fraction of retail price because we're in hard times right now. Also, don't buy too much into the 4 C's.. you want to make sure you're getting good value, but as long as it looks great to the naked eye, no one is walking around with a microscope in their pocket to pick out flaws. Find something decent that won't break the bank and spend enough knowing that you can upgrade down the line, but something that will look damn good in the mean time. Trust me, you think you're a cheapass now, wait until you start figuring out wedding expenses.
 
My fiance got one made at a lab. 1/2 carat pink diamond for exponentially less than what a mined pink diamond would cost. And it IS a "real" diamond, don't let any stupid ass jewelry store tell you otherwise. And that way you know for sure it is not a blood diamond. Then he custom-made a setting with a mom 'n' pop jeweler.
 
[quote name='Dead of Knight']My fiance got one made at a lab. 1/2 carat pink diamond for exponentially less than what a mined pink diamond would cost. And it IS a "real" diamond, don't let any stupid ass jewelry store tell you otherwise. And that way you know for sure it is not a blood diamond. Then he custom-made a setting with a mom 'n' pop jeweler.[/QUOTE]

Wow, I'm glad to see people thinking about where their jewelery comes from. Props to you both.
 
I got mine from diamond.com. Then like a CAG i clicked through a link to get 8% cashback, used a $150 code, and didn't say anything when they gave me 8% back twice. =]
 
Got mine at Zales, opened a Zales card no interest for 12 months, haggled with the guy on a clearance ring, got it down from $600 to $350
 
Actually, got my wife's engagement ring at Costco. I think at the time they actually guaranteed that its appraised value will be twice of what I paid. Of course that was 16 years ago.
 
I don't remember where, but my wife got the wedding bands for us off a site, that was very well done, and highly recommended. They'll actually send out a ring sizer for you to figure out your future wife's ring size. And to boot, I think we paid about $120 for my platinum band. I'll ask her tomorrow what the site is and post it on here.
 
[quote name='Dead of Knight']My fiance got one made at a lab. 1/2 carat pink diamond for exponentially less than what a mined pink diamond would cost. And it IS a "real" diamond, don't let any stupid ass jewelry store tell you otherwise. And that way you know for sure it is not a blood diamond. Then he custom-made a setting with a mom 'n' pop jeweler.[/QUOTE]

Good for you. Even without the blood aspect, the diamond business is a tremendous scam that deserves to be sunk by superior, yet inexpensive man-made product. Jewelry is just the tip of the iceberg. Being able to cheaply make big slabs of diamond is potentially the future of microprocessor substrates that will allow for fantastic advances over silicon.
 
http://e-weddingbands.com/store/bridal.html I apologize about the wait, and that its not the thing I promised, that it had engagement rings. But, it does have some really good deals on wedding rings, and even on loose diamonds. So, take it as you will. The idea about the lab-made diamond is really cool. I got my engagement ring at Belk shortly before they were switching to a new jewelry provider, we found a 14k g ring with a very unusual setting of small diamonds that because of the way the diamonds are set, if you take a picture of it with a flash they give off a flash that gives off the impression of a huge diamond.
 
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