Re: Engagements
Some people have shown some surprise at the cost of my wife's ring, but you have to remember that I had been gainfully employed for a while at that point. Also, my family has been going to the same jeweler for 4 generations (used to be Neff's, now Ritter's on Samson St in Philly) so the quality I received was high and the ring actually appraised for almost $11,000. The setting is actually made by the in-house jeweler so there are only a handful of setting like it in the world. A good ring is not just a a symbol, it is an heirloom and investment that increases value with time.
To get the most out of your jewelry, do NOT go to major chains. Their salespeople don't know anything and their success is based on selling crap to people who don't know any better.
Ask around, mainly your parent's friends and perhaps grandparents. They know stuff like this. The best jewelry stores are holes in the wall with little fanfare, just knowledgeable people who do business the OLD way.
Funny story: Walking into the jeweler, you would have thought it was vacant. It was a HUGE space with two small glass counters. MaryAnn (owner and gemologist) came out wearing nurse's scrubs, a tight perm and horn rimmed glasses with a chain around the back of the neck.
She yelled "Hi, Kurt! Nice to finally meet you!" and unceramoniously dumped 3-4 diamonds (in a fancy manilla envelop) onto a velvet cloth. She told me that two of them were the best for me, but she wanted to show me a larger stone of lower quality and a smaller stone of very high quality as well. She asked me to pick out which was which and handed me the jeweler's glass (little eyepiece you see in movies). Mary Anne proceeded to teach me how to look for color, clarity and flaws in a diamond and then had me attempt to rate them based on the national quality scale (I was pretty accurate).
I was all set to pick the slightly larger stone, but Mary Anne asked me to step outside and look them all in the sun.
So we walked out in the middle of the street with about $50,000 in diamonds in our open palms. This blew my mind. When asked about how dangerous this was, she simply said:
"Honey, you could leave a 20 foot stack of hundreds in the street on Jeweler's Row. There are about 30 plainclothes (undercover police) out here right now."
It was the sun that made my decision, and it's because of the two that had similar clarity and color, the slightly smaller one had a better cut and it made me squint it sparkled so bright. With that, we went back inside and I han ded over more cash than I've ever spent at one time in my life.
But in the end, my wife still gets comments from other women about the ring, and the way it sparkles because of the GREAT cut with good clarity and color makes it stand out.
__________________
|
Silver, the cool thing is they were the first of its kind, the smith had just designed them. 
Hybrid Mode
