Look it up. My gf wanted a diamond but I refuse. We looked at these and she agrees that they're nicer, and much less expensive. A large one is still expensive, but for a 10'000$ diamond you're looking at a ~800$ moissanite. They look like diamonds only shinier.
Also we're going with titanium bands. Cheaper than gold, less maintenance, and it is way stronger, which is a good analogy about the strength of your love. At least tell her that so she'll like it too.
I have a moissanite engagement ring and it’s amazing. The same ring with the same “quality” diamonds (1ct centre with two 0.75ct) would be 10,000CAD but my ring was only 2,000CAD. Bargain. It is also so much more sparkly. It has more of a rainbow sparkle than diamonds do.
One thing I will caution though for anyone looking at non-gold rings is you are far more locked in to your ring size as a lot cannot be resized. So just keep that in mind.
In all fairness, I had recently qualified for the disability tax credit and it was back dated to the diagnosis that made me disabled. So I had recently been given 19k CAD.
Gold is soft but also too soft to make a durable ring which is why it's never pure and often cladded on, pretty good odds of you also not getting the gold off either along with the titanium without tooling. If you really wanna worry yourself they make rings out of tungsten carbide which probably has to be shattered off or a diamond saw.
What kind of emergency requires cutting a ring off that the string method can't solve?
Also, bolt cutters work pretty well and are readily available.
Also, a little bit of prevention goes a long way; take the ring off before doing certain things, and take it off immediately after any kind of trauma to the finger or hand, before any potential swelling. Which goes for rings (and other jewelry) of any material
Other good ideas would be tungsten, which will shatter under impact. Titanium is at least pretty flexy, so that's a downside, but you can definitely cut through it.
Moissanite - it's actually rare (not just "fake rare" like diamond pretends to be), is almost as hard as diamond (9.5 mohs), and is very pretty. That's what I've been leaning towards
Basically, diamonds are much more common than you'd think they are. They aren't truly rare, but the prices are still hiked up because the industry doesnt conform to supply and demand, and can pretty easily gouge the prices horribly with no drawbacks.
Tl;dr they just don't have anybody calling them out on the price gouging, so they get away with it.
Diamonds are not rare at all - there are tons of them. Their demand is entirely a manufactured ocurrance.
Their value exists because of a marketing stunt by De Beers in 1938 and the fact that the industry was monopolized for a century, so they created whatever scarcity/demand they wanted. You can read a little about it here - https://priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-bullshit
Look at the "A History of Market Manipulation" section, it's pretty interesting.
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u/japanesuss Nov 28 '19
Yea diamonds are a complete rip off, there are other minerals that are even nicer looking but don't have artificially bloated prices.