Hobbyholic, whilst we appreciate your offer to help one of our Aussie members there are a few spelling mistakes in your post that we need to query.

"I can get them cheat" - I trust this is a spelling mistake ..... but the 'T' on my keyboard is a long way from the 'P'.

"Whess" - Perhaps this means 'Guess' or perhaps it means 'What' ??

advise - this should be 'advice'.

Have you provided diamonds for any other members of S2Ki before?

 

I third that! Unfortunately my significant other doesn't fourth that.

I don't understand the fascination with sparkly chips of carbon lattice. Are women like Jay birds? Do they have an instinctive attraction to all that sparkles.

Or are they just victims of the media (a repeating theme of mine) and like them because they are told they like them.

The diamond trade is one of the most dispicable industries known to man. It enslaves thousands of natives at less than sustainable wages and ravages large tracts of land. The product then falls into the hands of cartels that rival the Columbian drug lords in their ferocity to protect their trade.

It's fairly well known that diamonds are not as rare as we are lead to believe and the myth of their scarcity is maintained to protect their price. That a young couple would spend thousands of dollars on a lump of inanimate carbon before investing for their future just so some Dutch dude can afford another yamika absolutely horrifies me.

 

Well call me a Jay Bird!

I have 3 rows of diamonds on my wedding ring, and my wife has diamonds in both her engagement ring and wedding ring.

Though I will admit that they are WAY over priced - it's just fortunate that a friend of mine's father is a diamond wholesaler.

P.S. Congrats Blackie!! Being married is awesome....

 

Sounds more like we should call you Liberace!

 

Wow! A lot more replies than I expected. Thanks for all the advice guys. Like 2kturkey and AusS2000, I really don't see the value in a diamond. If only my SO thought the same way. She's fairly traditional and since all her friends and my friends are slowly getting hitched and getting bigger and better rocks on their fingers, I feel she shouldn't miss out. I suggested once if she would prefer a nice holiday to Europe instead of a diamond, and in typical female fashion, she replied "both".

Looks like I will hold out. I only know of retailers in Melb at the moment. So will probably have to do more research on wholesalers and brokers.

 

My wife and I are somewhere in the middle here. She got an engagement ring, but I bought what I thought she would like to wear every day. It cost me much less than a week's earnings, not the 3-6 months that de Beers et al try to convince us is necessary, and the feature stone is a small emerald. I don't know where it is written that engagement rings have to be diamond and that bigger is better. When I see the boulders some women carry around I think their vanity has gotten in the way of common sense. They look so uncomfortable and inconvenient, and what if it gets lost/stolen? Anyone who thinks they need a bigger diamond or risk being outdone by their friends needs to grow up a bit. Fortunately my wife agrees that huge rocks are in bad taste and a waste of time and money, but if she didn't, she wouldn't have got one anyway

 

My advice would be to buy from a reputable local shop, e.g. Prouds.
Let her pick the diamond and setting.
Let her feel she is getting what she wants and that it is hurting you a little but not too much.

When we got engaged back in 1976 we went to Diamond Traders in Sydney.
The ring cost $640 which all went on my credit card and took quite a while to pay off - along with the honeymoon and other expenses. A typical credit card limit, such as I had, was $1000 back then. I think $640 would have been about 2 weeks pay at the time. We went for quality rather than size but it really is irrelevant since the ring will never be sold. So long as she is happy and you are happy the purchase will have been a success.

 

Ahh if only it were so easy, and it was only 2 weeks pay. I know she wants to be surprised, and wants me to put the effort in to be able to pick out something I know she will like. So far she has insinuated designs from her girly mags from brands such as Cartier, Musson, etc.

 

Good luck picking someting you know she will like.
I still cant do that after 28 years of marriage.

My son-in-law did it your way when he proposed to my daughter 2 years ago.
He bought the ring by himself and she loved it.

I guess he might have spent more like 6 weeks pay on it.

Actually the number of weeks etc might be affected by relative costs between 1976 and 2005. Perhaps diamonds are more expensive now.

 

My wife picked out her setting and diamond. It was a little more than I had planned on but still within reason.

She gets complements on it all the time and she loves it.

Best money I've ever spent. She has had them for 8 years now and she doesn't even look at other jewelry. She feels that her ring is so nice that other stuff would just detract from it.

Tiffany's is pricey and you are paying for a name. I went through a gal who started off by bringing diamonds in from Belgium and selling them in her home. She married a fellow diamond broker and they opened a little shop (an appointment only buzzer admittance kind of place)

We were classmates years ago so that helped matters a bit too.