The lovergirls out there wanted to know all the details of my proposal (which you can read right here), but the material girls still want to know about the ring.
And believe me, I want to tell you all about it! The Road to Ring was not easy for me — at first, I told Pat I wasn’t sure I wanted a diamond at all. I thought a simple gold cigar band would do the trick, not to mention alleviate me of the stress of having to wear a diamond every day and potentially lose or damage it.
Pretty quickly, we both decided a more traditional ring was the right move. For one thing, it meant a lot to Pat to get me one. And while I thought I didn’t care, I realized I had a selfish desire for those around me to know I had found The One. When I pictured Future Me rattling off my order at the deli (talking with my hands, naturally), I wanted the person behind the counter to see a flash of my ring and know I was ordering for my husband and I! Something about it all felt Very Adult to me.
And so, we began our hunt for The Ring. Here’s how it went down.
From the beginning, Pat and I knew we wanted to get our ring from Spring Lake Jewelers. Boris and the SLJ team have been my family’s go-to spot for some time, and given that neither of us knew a thing about diamonds, we wanted to buy from someone we could trust.
We met with Boris and chatted about our wants and needs, but I didn’t know enough yet to request anything specific, although I did enjoy trying on a few funky styles he had on display.
![Images of three unique engagement rings from Spring Lake Jewelers. Images of three unique engagement rings from Spring Lake Jewelers.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2f8ec21a-abac-4c8c-b991-740a0c30bd85_6050x4032.png)
Cut to me spending a lot of nights on Pinterest and Google, trying to make sense of colors, cuts and clarity. All I knew was that I wanted a gold band, and at first, I thought an emerald cut was best. I’ve always had what I refer to as “mobster fingers”, so I thought a chunky, blocky stone would look better than something too dainty. With a big gold bezel? Even better.
However, fancy shapes started to catch my eye, and I began wondering if a marquise or pear-shaped diamond might distract from my generally fugly fingers and mediocre manicures.
Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that buying a diamond was crazy. As someone who works in fashion, I’m no stranger to the marketing and mark-ups that make the diamond industry what it is. These stones are simply rocks we’ve positioned as ~proof of love and commitment~, and thereby slapped an unreasonable price tag on to justify it. Couldn’t I be in love without giving a company thousands of dollars just to prove the point?
The ethics of it all concerned me, too, and I started to wonder if a lab grown stone might suit me better. It might make me feel less like I’d been scammed by the diamond industry, and I liked knowing it would be ethically sourced.
(Spoiler alert — I didn’t go the lab-grown route route. But for the record, I’m all for it!)
We decided to ask Boris to show us multiple pear-shaped diamonds, some natural and some lab-grown. I urged him not to tell me which were which, so that I could decide for myself based on the look alone.
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