I am a prominent LW poster; this is a through-away account because my girlfriend also uses LW.
I would like to propose to my girlfriend in the near future. For this I would like to use a diamond ring. I have never bought one before, so would appreciate any advice. The main things I would like help with:
Not paying extra due to ignorance
Ensuring she never has cause to regret the choice of stone/ring.
Anything else you think I should know.
Some background in case it helps:
I live in NYC, so have access to the diamond district.
I am leaning towards an artificial diamond, as it seems hard to guarantee conflict-free otherwise (which does not seem romantic!) and we are both pretty pro-science.
I do not recommend choosing a diamond. Diamonds are both less pretty than and more expensive than moissanite; if you have the budget for a diamond, you can get better for cheaper with moissanite. The exception is if you know for a fact the recipient is a natural stone chauvinist, which doesn’t sound like your situation at all (you basically can’t get natural moissanite). Bonus: moissanite is from SPACE.
If you are unwilling to consult her in advance on her taste in rocks, the safe choice is a gold-band solitaire with a round brilliant cut rock set in prongs. More expensive, more interesting, and also pretty safe is a “past present future” setting with three rocks, matching if you want to be conservative about it. I’m not sure what the conventional alloy for gold-looking jewelry that needs to not deform with use is, but if it looks like yellow gold and anyone makes a point of telling you how many carats it is, it’s probably good.
This is a perfect exemplar of something I really hate about this website. A poster asks for advice about how to buy a diamond, and instead he gets mostly replies saying “don’t buy a diamond.” I will try and actually be helpful.
My advice would be:
Your girlfriend probably has much stronger views than you do about jewellery, and after all she will be the one wearing it. Propose with a “fake” ring, then go shopping for the “real” ring together. I got a very nice-looking ring off Amazon for £10 to propose with. This minimises the chance of making a bad decision, and is also a romantic thing to do together.
If you do insist on buying the ring beforehand, make sure you can take it back. Many places will do returns within 30 days. Borrow a ring she finds comfortable to get the sizing.
Do not get hung up about high degrees of quality. VS2 clarity and H colour is plenty. She will never tell the difference between having a VS2 and VVS1 diamond on her finger—these differences are only visible when put next to another diamond in the right light, which will never happen.
But make sure the cut is top quality.
Shop around. My experience is in London, but over here the prices in the diamond quarter and online are about the same. Beware of anyone who won’t give you a straight price. Despite what anyone tells you, diamonds are close to commodities.
Make sure you get a certificate, and don’t buy anything with a non-GIA certificate.
She will be wearing the ring all the time, and indefinitely into the future, which means there will be inevitable wear-and-tear. So platinum is probably the best metal.
There is no reason to spend anything like the upper range of your budget. You can get an extremely nice (genuine) ring in the bottom half of that price range, and artificial will only be cheaper.
This is a perfect exemplar of something I really hate about this website. A poster asks for advice about how to buy a diamond, and instead he gets mostly replies saying “don’t buy a diamond.” I will try and actually be helpful.
Being pedantic, the original question was
I would like to propose to my girlfriend in the near future. For this I would like to use a diamond ring.
and your first suggestion was
Propose with a “fake” ring, then go shopping for the “real” ring together.
This seems like a reasonable suggestion. But I think you applied the same heuristics as others, just less far. Those heuristics being “infer motives from question; give advice satisfying inferred motives”. The motive you inferred seems to have been “I’d like to propose, and I’d like my girlfriend to end up with a diamond ring”. Others seem to have inferred something closer to “I’d like to propose with a ring with a pretty stone in it”.
Basically I think that “being helpful” is a difficult game, and “answer the question as asked” doesn’t lead to optimal helpfulness, and I don’t have a good solution for this.
Meta: You raise an interesting point about not getting the answers you want. Being aware of the barrier to communication I can only say, “be specific”. I have found similar problems when posting here and also in other critical-thought places. It led to my being specific in this recent discussion post twice over.
I would not be blaming the community for this result; but rather the clarity of the way the question was asked. The top post can be edited if needed; or asked again and phrased differently if necessary.
Also the original post did say
I am leaning towards an artificial diamond
indicating an awareness of alternative options and a willingness to go for alternatives.
How would you respond if a poster asked for advice as to how to best transfer money to Nigeria in order to receive a large amount of money in payment for this service?
That is a really bad analogy. When sending money to Nigeria you expect more money and will receive nothing. When buying a diamond you expect a diamond and will receive a diamond. Your personal ideas about its value are quite irrelevant here.
Propose with a “fake” ring, then go shopping for the “real” ring together.
Err… I don’t know. Proposing with a fake £10 ring sounds cheesy to me. You can always go shopping together for the wedding bands :-)
don’t buy anything with a non-GIA certificate.
GIA and AGS certificates are both fine. EGS and IGL are more iffy in the sense that they will grade a diamond higher than GIA or AGS would—downgrade their ratings one or two notches for comparison.
So platinum is probably the best metal
Well, the first choice is between yellow and white—some people want yellow (gold) jewelry. In white, do NOT buy white gold, it’s rhodium-coated and the coating wears off. You are supposed to renew it every few years. Buy either platinum (expensive) or palladium (less so).
Err… I don’t know. Proposing with a fake £10 ring sounds cheesy to me. You can always go shopping together for the wedding bands :-)
I agree it would be cheesy to propose with something fake-looking, but you can buy a really nice-looking ring for that price, that she is unlikely to realise isn’t real (unless she’s a jeweller). I proposed that way and afterwards when I told my fiancee that we had to buy a real ring, she was surprised that the ring wasn’t real. Maybe I shouldn’t have told her :)
The problem with non-GIA certificates is that because GIA is the standard, the reason that anyone submitted to a non-GIA authority is that they think they’ll get a higher price if they sell it with a non-GIA certificate. In which case you, as customer, are paying more for the same diamond...
Well, the first choice is between yellow and white—some people want yellow (gold) jewelry.
This is true. As the fiancee wears both gold and silver, I assumed she was OK with both.
I know a guy who met his fiancee while working as a volunteer on an art installation in New York. He proposed with a nut (of the nut-and-bolt kind) from that installation :-/
This is a perfect exemplar of something I really hate about this website. A poster asks for advice about how to buy a diamond, and instead he gets mostly replies saying “don’t buy a diamond.” I will try and actually be helpful.
Well, it’s hard to give actually useful advise in that category, but coming up with a reason not to buy a diamond is an easy way to signal your cleverness.
I live in NYC, so have access to the diamond district
Don’t go to the diamond district. You’ll just get a lot of high-pressure sales tactics and, likely, misleading information.
I am leaning towards an artificial diamond
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.
My price range
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?
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 how much your GF likes being romantic and how much she likes to follow social traditions and conventions. (And how much you like to follow them, and what it predicts about your long-term marriage stability. Are there any other social conventions that you would less like to follow?)
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.
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.
This has always struck me as such a strange argument against buying a diamond ring, because it’s true about every retail purchase. If you buy a chair, then turn around and try to sell it back to the store, you’d be lucky to get 30%, but no-one thinks that’s an argument for sitting on the floor. You buy a chair because you want to sit on it, not as the start of a complicated chair-resale scheme. Similarly, you buy a diamond ring because you (or your beloved) want to wear it.
Note: I am not blaming you in particular, because this is a popular argument, but talk about a selective demand for rigour!
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.
There’s still a lot of stuff “beneath the surface”, and so I still think my criticisms still apply, but obviously a lot less so if they’re truly conflict-free.
The point of the diamond is to be a costly signal of commitment. In order to be a good signal, the shiny rock has to be useless. If it provided x thousand dollars of value, it would inherently be a poor signal.
Using the x thousands of dollars to do good might work as a signal if you wouldn’t have spent the money on doing good otherwise.
The point of the diamond is to be a costly signal of commitment. In order to be a good signal, the shiny rock has to be useless.
Not quite. Don’t forget that the guy gives the diamond to the girl. It becomes her property—there is a transfer of value ($) happening.
One of the signals there is “Look how large/expensive a rock I can afford” (which doesn’t require the rock to be useless) and another signal is “Look how much value I’m willing to give to you just in exchange for your goodwill and favour” (which also does not require the rock to be useless).
It’s a signal on both sides. She accepts the rock rather than telling you to give her x thousands of useful goods to show that what she wants from the process is commitment, not money.
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.
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.
I am a prominent LW poster; this is a through-away account because my girlfriend also uses LW.
I would like to propose to my girlfriend in the near future. For this I would like to use a diamond ring. I have never bought one before, so would appreciate any advice. The main things I would like help with:
Not paying extra due to ignorance
Ensuring she never has cause to regret the choice of stone/ring.
Anything else you think I should know.
Some background in case it helps:
I live in NYC, so have access to the diamond district.
I am leaning towards an artificial diamond, as it seems hard to guarantee conflict-free otherwise (which does not seem romantic!) and we are both pretty pro-science.
My price range is orgjrra bar naq gra gubhfnaq qbyynef, ohg V jbhyq cersre gbjneqf gur ybjre raq bs gur enatr
My girlfreind is neither unusually fat nor unusually skinny for an American of marriageable age. She is white.
She does not wear much jewelry. The stuff she has is mainly (fake?) yellow gold and silver, mainly gifts.
I am probably looking for a relatively simple design, round stone.
I do not recommend choosing a diamond. Diamonds are both less pretty than and more expensive than moissanite; if you have the budget for a diamond, you can get better for cheaper with moissanite. The exception is if you know for a fact the recipient is a natural stone chauvinist, which doesn’t sound like your situation at all (you basically can’t get natural moissanite). Bonus: moissanite is from SPACE.
If you are unwilling to consult her in advance on her taste in rocks, the safe choice is a gold-band solitaire with a round brilliant cut rock set in prongs. More expensive, more interesting, and also pretty safe is a “past present future” setting with three rocks, matching if you want to be conservative about it. I’m not sure what the conventional alloy for gold-looking jewelry that needs to not deform with use is, but if it looks like yellow gold and anyone makes a point of telling you how many carats it is, it’s probably good.
This is a perfect exemplar of something I really hate about this website. A poster asks for advice about how to buy a diamond, and instead he gets mostly replies saying “don’t buy a diamond.” I will try and actually be helpful.
My advice would be:
Your girlfriend probably has much stronger views than you do about jewellery, and after all she will be the one wearing it. Propose with a “fake” ring, then go shopping for the “real” ring together. I got a very nice-looking ring off Amazon for £10 to propose with. This minimises the chance of making a bad decision, and is also a romantic thing to do together.
If you do insist on buying the ring beforehand, make sure you can take it back. Many places will do returns within 30 days. Borrow a ring she finds comfortable to get the sizing.
Do not get hung up about high degrees of quality. VS2 clarity and H colour is plenty. She will never tell the difference between having a VS2 and VVS1 diamond on her finger—these differences are only visible when put next to another diamond in the right light, which will never happen.
But make sure the cut is top quality.
Shop around. My experience is in London, but over here the prices in the diamond quarter and online are about the same. Beware of anyone who won’t give you a straight price. Despite what anyone tells you, diamonds are close to commodities.
Make sure you get a certificate, and don’t buy anything with a non-GIA certificate.
She will be wearing the ring all the time, and indefinitely into the future, which means there will be inevitable wear-and-tear. So platinum is probably the best metal.
There is no reason to spend anything like the upper range of your budget. You can get an extremely nice (genuine) ring in the bottom half of that price range, and artificial will only be cheaper.
Being pedantic, the original question was
and your first suggestion was
This seems like a reasonable suggestion. But I think you applied the same heuristics as others, just less far. Those heuristics being “infer motives from question; give advice satisfying inferred motives”. The motive you inferred seems to have been “I’d like to propose, and I’d like my girlfriend to end up with a diamond ring”. Others seem to have inferred something closer to “I’d like to propose with a ring with a pretty stone in it”.
Basically I think that “being helpful” is a difficult game, and “answer the question as asked” doesn’t lead to optimal helpfulness, and I don’t have a good solution for this.
examples of reasonably pretty looking amazon rings http://www.amazon.com/AnaZoz-Jewelry-Elegant-Platinum-Engagement/dp/B00YJH9IG2/ref=sr_1_6?s=apparel&ie=UTF8&qid=1433199898&sr=1-6 http://www.amazon.com/AnaZoz-Platinum-Austrian-Crystals-Elements/dp/B00YJHD94O/ref=sr_1_30?s=apparel&ie=UTF8&qid=1433199898&sr=1-30
gold plated: http://www.amazon.com/AnaZoz-Jewelry-Elements-Austrian-Crystals/dp/B00YJHIMW8/ref=sr_1_14?s=apparel&ie=UTF8&qid=1433200135&sr=1-14
in the ~$100 range not the $5 range as above: http://www.amazon.com/Size-10-Sterling-Diamond-Wedding/dp/B00PDQY4SK/ref=sr_1_12?s=apparel&ie=UTF8&qid=1433200210&sr=1-12&keywords=gold+plated
Meta: You raise an interesting point about not getting the answers you want. Being aware of the barrier to communication I can only say, “be specific”. I have found similar problems when posting here and also in other critical-thought places. It led to my being specific in this recent discussion post twice over.
I would not be blaming the community for this result; but rather the clarity of the way the question was asked. The top post can be edited if needed; or asked again and phrased differently if necessary.
Also the original post did say
indicating an awareness of alternative options and a willingness to go for alternatives.
How would you respond if a poster asked for advice as to how to best transfer money to Nigeria in order to receive a large amount of money in payment for this service?
That is a really bad analogy. When sending money to Nigeria you expect more money and will receive nothing. When buying a diamond you expect a diamond and will receive a diamond. Your personal ideas about its value are quite irrelevant here.
I would respond with extra information in the areas of people who have experienced similar as well as advice in the area.
Err… I don’t know. Proposing with a fake £10 ring sounds cheesy to me. You can always go shopping together for the wedding bands :-)
GIA and AGS certificates are both fine. EGS and IGL are more iffy in the sense that they will grade a diamond higher than GIA or AGS would—downgrade their ratings one or two notches for comparison.
Well, the first choice is between yellow and white—some people want yellow (gold) jewelry. In white, do NOT buy white gold, it’s rhodium-coated and the coating wears off. You are supposed to renew it every few years. Buy either platinum (expensive) or palladium (less so).
I agree it would be cheesy to propose with something fake-looking, but you can buy a really nice-looking ring for that price, that she is unlikely to realise isn’t real (unless she’s a jeweller). I proposed that way and afterwards when I told my fiancee that we had to buy a real ring, she was surprised that the ring wasn’t real. Maybe I shouldn’t have told her :)
The problem with non-GIA certificates is that because GIA is the standard, the reason that anyone submitted to a non-GIA authority is that they think they’ll get a higher price if they sell it with a non-GIA certificate. In which case you, as customer, are paying more for the same diamond...
This is true. As the fiancee wears both gold and silver, I assumed she was OK with both.
A friend of mine proposed with an engraved multitool… that’s a very special pair of people though.
I know a guy who met his fiancee while working as a volunteer on an art installation in New York. He proposed with a nut (of the nut-and-bolt kind) from that installation :-/
She accepted :-)
Well, it’s hard to give actually useful advise in that category, but coming up with a reason not to buy a diamond is an easy way to signal your cleverness.
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?
He likely means a synthetic, i.e. lab-grown, diamond. This site has the best Google SEO.
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 how much your GF likes being romantic and how much she likes to follow social traditions and conventions. (And how much you like to follow them, and what it predicts about your long-term marriage stability. Are there any other social conventions that you would less like to follow?)
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/
This has always struck me as such a strange argument against buying a diamond ring, because it’s true about every retail purchase. If you buy a chair, then turn around and try to sell it back to the store, you’d be lucky to get 30%, but no-one thinks that’s an argument for sitting on the floor. You buy a chair because you want to sit on it, not as the start of a complicated chair-resale scheme. Similarly, you buy a diamond ring because you (or your beloved) want to wear it.
Note: I am not blaming you in particular, because this is a popular argument, but talk about a selective demand for rigour!
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.
Do your criticisms also apply to artificial diamonds? It seems likely that ve knows something about the diamond industry, given
Woops, I missed that statement. My apologies.
There’s still a lot of stuff “beneath the surface”, and so I still think my criticisms still apply, but obviously a lot less so if they’re truly conflict-free.
The point of the diamond is to be a costly signal of commitment. In order to be a good signal, the shiny rock has to be useless. If it provided x thousand dollars of value, it would inherently be a poor signal.
Using the x thousands of dollars to do good might work as a signal if you wouldn’t have spent the money on doing good otherwise.
Not quite. Don’t forget that the guy gives the diamond to the girl. It becomes her property—there is a transfer of value ($) happening.
One of the signals there is “Look how large/expensive a rock I can afford” (which doesn’t require the rock to be useless) and another signal is “Look how much value I’m willing to give to you just in exchange for your goodwill and favour” (which also does not require the rock to be useless).
It’s a signal on both sides. She accepts the rock rather than telling you to give her x thousands of useful goods to show that what she wants from the process is commitment, not money.
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.
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.