major blingage

So I FINALLY have an engagement ring. Calloo! Callay! While I've been pretty online-chatty about the engagement, in person the only people who know are my Facebook friends and family because the moment you mention your engagement to a passive third-party, suddenly they're all straining their necks to take a glance at your left hand. And then I'm all "Well, I don't have a ring *yet*" which sounds like "Yeah, so my boyfriend mentioned possibly getting married and is just a browbeat away from caving in," when in reality I did get a real proposal, just not one accompanied with bling. So here it is! Set in platinum, and those two green thingies are peridot. There's also scrollwork (hard to see even in person) shaped like a stretched figure eight with a little spiral worked in. I like it!



Dano designed my ring and it's just lovely. Originally I wanted to avoid diamonds altogether because I think they're a rip-off. Then tradition got the best of me, and we briefly considered a synthesized diamond because they're about 1/3 the price of a natural one and we could afford a much nicer quality than otherwise, but even that was so expensive. Couple this with the fact that I'm not really a bling girl anyway, and I'd rather have a house than a $20k engagement ring. It'd be less weird paired with my gaudy costume jewelry. At the same time, I don't know that I could really bring myself to get a cubic zirconia because it loses its lustre after not too long and feels . . . apologetic.

So Dan found Sachs Jewelers in Shrewsbury who recommended Moissanite. Moissanite is a mineral similar to diamond, originally found in meteorites, but due to their extreme rarity in nature (usually as inclusions in diamonds and other stones) are now synthesized. The cool thing is that they are really not all that different from a diamond. On the hardness scale a diamond is at 10 and Moissanite is 8.5-9.25--similar enough to be sought after for industrial uses. So hardness is all well and good, but doesn't really affect the way my jewelry looks, right?



WELL, Moissanite also weighs in on the visual front. Its refractive index (a measure of "flashes" or how many times it sparkles) is about 10% higher (diamond = 2.417, moissanite ~ 2.670) so for every ten sparkles a diamond gets, my stone gets one more. What's SUPER cool, though is that the dispersion (a measure of how wide the color spectrum is bent by the stone) is more than twice that of a diamond (diamond = .044, moissanite = .104), so my stone throws off more than twice the color. So for all intents and purposes, it's a prettier stone! And unlike cubic zirconia, it'll last forever, just like a regular diamond.

Because it's synthesized, the clarity is excellent and there are no visible inclusions in the stone. The only limitation is that the stone itself is slightly off-white, though not visible in most light and probably not any more than ideal-cut diamonds might be anyway. I found information on this subject here.

Oh, did I mention that they're about a tenth of the price? Finally, it seems, that thrift gene has shone its head.

funny story...

My engagement ring is still pending. While this is, apparently, a very big deal to some girls, I like to say that he wouldn't dare buy a gift for me without my approval first, so we're off on a good foot.

There were rumors of some kind of family stone that Dan's mother had mentioned in one of her laments about not having grandchildren, but when we met with the parents we asked if there was some stone in the family that had sentiment attached to it and the answer was, well, it was no.

But that's okay! Dan wanted to design a ring for me anyway! He found a nice family place that was great to work with and they gave him a fair price on a nice little platinum number made to his exact specifications. Saturday morning we went to take a look and it was great! Just needed a few tweaks and a final sign-off and that thing is off for casting! So this morning he stopped by the shop, gave 'em a thumbs up and a non-returnable thousand dollar deposit and I'm going to have an engagement ring in a couple weeks. At which time my engagement will feel that much more real.

A couple hours later he gets an email from his mother. Apparently, when she died, his paternal grandmother's engagement ring had been set aside for just this occasion, has been held by his uncle for the last 20 years for whatever reason, and there is an early 50s vintage platinum ring with a square diamond in his mother's possession as we speak. Waiting for my elegant little finger.

I did weakly inquire as to whether perhaps the loss of the thousand dollar deposit might be worth not spending another couple thousand dollars on a ring that is no longer needed, and was told, pretty unequivocally, that no, that was not an option. So I suddenly find myself awash in valuable jewelry.

If I wore real jewelry with more frequency, I might consider turning Grandmother's ring into some kind of pendant, but honestly, that's not really my thing. Maybe I'll wear them both on different fingers, round out the look with eight other rings and go for the gypsy look.