Also remember that diamonds are a complete and utter fraud, via a worldwide marketing deception that has been beautifully crafted and perpetuated.

Try selling a diamond and see what it's [ireally[/i worth.

You can do far better going for a second hand (literally) ring. If the objection is that that's cheapskate, then I'd ask what message am I supposed to get by an insistence that I must get ripped off in buying inferior overpriced goods instead of getting something probably much nicer at half the price.

Depends where you work

RBS?

What's minimum wage these days? About a grand a month? I spent around half that on my wife's engagement ring and it hasn't gone green yet!

My fiancées is. It's an Emerald.

Thats very true



It can be difficult though if you are buying a ring for the first time and to look at it can be tricky to spot the difference in quality between different rings - many of which will look pretty similar.

May be useful to take a female relative with you when you pick one for a second opinion.

I told my mate that he could save money and probably get better quality if he bought second hand (he was short of money at the time too). He said "I don't want to get her something used". He ended up buying her ring from Argos

Do people still get engaged? Ahhh, bless! Little bit of planning. Little bit of bendy on one knee-ey. Little bit of advert in local rag with declaration of profound proudness of engaged couples parents...Little bit of selecting the big day and working oneselves up into a creamy lather about it all! Tisn't it all luvvverly?

Any ladies out there getting on one knee for their lucky man today...?

Or both knees?

Exactly. The average joe can't tell the difference between a diamond worth hundreds of thousands or a worthless replica, they will say they want the diamond for its 'beauty' but would end up thinking the replica was beautiful as well.

The only authentic market for diamonds is for industrial grade diamonds where the hardness of the diamond serves a purpose. The market for diamonds in jewellery etc is dependent on a dual strategy of both marketing and creating the image of a diamond as being alluring and mystical, and also on a small number of sellers exerting market power by restricting the supply.

These organised criminals that look to trade in diamonds are making the market more competitive by increasing the number of sellers and bringing the market price of diamonds closer to the cost of extraction and reducing the monopolists' rent, hence the huge amounts of campaigning against the rogue diamond trade. These groups are also involved in slavery, torture, murder etc so I am not saying they are good, but the high profile 'blood diamond' campaigning is not motivated just by concerns of human rights but by monopolists concerned about losing their market power.

where do you get a 2nd hand ring from???

Cash Converters probably

Most "proper" jewellers will sell them, but probably not your known-names high street jewellers who in all likelyhood don't even have a choice in what stock to put on their shelves - go to a small independent and you'll find second hand jewellery, my wife buys it by preference due to the rip-off effect of new stock as highlighted by FA.

Your average jeweller retails at 100% mark-up (or at least they did up until a few years ago when I knew a few of them) so any new engagement ring that you buy is only "worth" half of what you pay for it when you walk out of the shop and the stone in it is worth less than that given the price of gold/silver etc today, that fact alone should sober you up pretty quickly.

Second hand jewellery on the other hand is normally trade-in or sell-in stock which the jeweller considers too good to scrap, and they'll generally barter with you to get rid of it - you can't be conned if its hallmarked, you can see if its worn or scratched (it probably wouldn't be sold if it was), and generally you'll get a higher carat rating of gold than you would have been able to afford anyway (9ct stuff usually gets scrapped anyway).

Well worth looking out for.

Don't you think that, giving credit where it's due though, the marketing of diamond rings is as good an example of marketing as there has ever been? I mean, a engagement ring is the basic vehicle, but the overwhelming majority of women would probably be convinced that only a DIAMOND ring counts as a "proper" engagement ring and that the bigger and more expensive the stone, the better. The belief that if it's an engagement ring, it HAS to be diamond has become so de rigueur it's now pretty much engrained in the psyche of Western civilisation, such that purchasing an alternative would usually be viewed as a mixture of cheapskate, inappropriate and even grounds for a divorce!

With the sole exception of religion, I can't readily think of any other marketing ploy remotely near this achievement. What an astonishing piece of brainwashing. Respect, de Beers.

From a girls point of view, I couldn't have cared less how much my engagement ring costs, I like it and it was bought on the spur of the moment while we were in Holland on a Dutch Dash which means more to me than cost. I should add we didn't decide to get married while we were in Holland, we were planning it for a while but hadn't got around to go searching for a ring.

The ring doesn't really matter does it? unless you're a gold digger type and hoping for a big fat gypsy wedding too

But did you choose a diamond ring?

Yes, but only because previous engagement rings (to other people) were not solitaire diamonds and I wanted something different from the past. Anyway I was in Holland which is very well known for its diamonds.

Just reading that back and it sounds like I've been engaged dozens of time

Only two pretend engagments and one real one

Absolutely.

The only proviso that I'd add is that a jeweller who will move along with current trends will always be a successful jeweller - see the marketing by the company "Hot Diamonds" for an example.

My father knew two jewellers who were from the old school, they had a small shop on a local high street for forty years but would never sell costume jewellery, it was almost beneath them to sell 9ct, ultimately this led to their demise and one of them ended up working for me as a mechanical service engineer before his retirement and his lasting regret is that he let his partner try and maintain their "standards" for far too long, costume and "party" jewellery was where the money was, not so big a mark-up but a huge turnover, they were looking to retail 14 and 18ct ear-rings for £100 plus whereas 90% of the walk-in trade was looking for a £10 pair.

And the fact is that 99% of the population would be totally unable to tell the difference between a diamond, cubic zirconia or even paste.

If costume jewellery can pass for a million pound item, the only essential difference is that the person owning the real thing - if they can persuade people that it's real - must get a buzz out of others being awestruck by how much money they must have spent.

I was recently speaking to a mother at my son's school who was telling me how she'd bought her four year old daughter some 'genuine diamond' ear rings for Christmas. She went on to say that they were [ireally[/i expensive, so she wouldn't be allowing her daughter to wear them for school because she didn't want to have to replace them if they got lost. You know when you just want to shake someone until they lose consciousness?

Yep, I can see it now, there the lass is on a Sunday, wearing these ear rings on a Sunday which look as if they could cost anything from £1 upwards, and the silly bint desperately seeking kudos by telling anyone in earshot how much she paid, succeeding only in providing confirmation of her own utter stupidity.

Unerringly accurate. Do you know her?