Don't give her the ring till the night before the wedding. I've been engaged four times. I should know.
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Don't give her the ring till the night before the wedding. I've been engaged four times. I should know.
ok Delboy :)
Rich, buy online from the states. Even with import duty, it's much cheaper.
I'd got my beloved a diamond ear-stud* set in white gold, about 1/3rd of a carat DIF. {highest category, D colour (the top) and Internally Flawless (IF)} which got nicked or lost in India and I had to get a replacement.
De Beers (who I'd got 3 rings off in the past, all white gold with diamonds, who'd cleaned said ear-stud for us before even though we'd bought it at duty free) and they were quoting us around £4k, as were the other London jewellers I checked.
I found this place in the states online who sold the diamonds as well as rings etc. I got a 0.4 carat DIF with excellent cut (the best) for about £2k, including the 23% import taxes (made up of two separate things) and they set it into a white gold stud for free, with a screw on back so it won't ever leave her ear again (Ganpati willing.) All with the GIA certificate so the diamond has its own number.
If you want me to try and find the website for you, I will. They had online text chat etc, and the lady was really helpful. I left a review for them as asked, and read some of the others. All were as +ve as mine. I don't normally like yanks, but this lot were excellent and I'd thoroughly recommend them.
So if you want me to try and find it, let me know and I'll try.
*We call it an Manikaran. That means ear jewel in Hindi. There's a village of that name in the Parvati Valley in the Himalayas (the Valley starts at Bhuntar on the road going north from Delhi, about an hour short of Manali.) Parvati lost her ear jewel there and Shiva asked the river to give it back, but it wouldn't. So (according to the sign on the small Hindu temple there) Shiva went up to the mountains and made puja by smoking chillums of charras for 13,000 years and came back full of prana (spiritual energy.)
Using this force, he ordered Sheshnag, the serpent deity in the river, to give him the manikaran back. "Sheshnag hissed thereby giving rise to a flow of boiling water. The water spread over the entire area resulting in the emergence of precious stones of the type Goddess Parvati had lost." And it kept giving jewels (people would find them regularly) until some earthquake in 1907 stopped it. But the whole place is full of natural hot springs from Sheshnag's hissing. The giant Sikh temple (or Gurdwara - it's the 4th holiest site in Sikhism) has a huge male (and separate small female) waist deep pool inside it. It's probably my favourite place in the whole world. There's a bridge from that part of the temple to the other side where there's a open pool where you can go mixed.
Anyway, that's why we had to get the manikaran. If you want me to try and find the yank jewellers website let me know and I'll look. You'll get your diamonds for about half the price of London. (Though the Brexit pound collapse will have changed this a bit. But you'd be silly not to look first.)
Personally, we prefer white gold to platinum. If you look at De Beers et al, they always use white gold. (oh, and if it was up to me, I'd just buy the best and biggest diamond your budget will allow, and just have that alone on a white gold ring without any halo of little diamonds. The classic look.)