Diamond Engagement Rings Specialist

A few days ago, at the 2008 MTV VMA Awards in Hollywood, what caught everyone’s attention was the huge turn out of stars as well as the massive bling they chose to adorn themselves with. It was as though they couldn’t get enough of diamonds. Their sparkle lit up the red carpet as cameras flashed, setting off a myriad sparkling rays.

There were bracelets, necklaces, bangles, cuffs and earrings. And of course, there were diamond rings. What seemed to be very popular were right hand diamond rings. Maybe there are too many controversial news reports being sparked off with diamond rings being worn on the engagement finger!

The celebs included Rihanna, Demi Moore and many more, all with intricately set diamonds. It really was a diamond day for music awards.

From ancient times, Wales has seen gold mining. The early Welsh nobility are said to have worn jewellery made with the gold from their land. However, there hasn’t been enough gold to keep it going as a thriving gold industry. The earliest Welsh gold mine in fact has become a tourist attraction though there seems to have been mining done there as early as 1000 years ago. There are two areas where the gold mining operation was concentrated. In the north, it was the region that lies between Snowdonia and Barmouth and in the south, which is where the Roman mining took place, it is situated at Dolaucothi in Carmarthenshire and this is the earliest known gold mine.

There is gold in the Welsh hills but the sad fact is that it costs three times as much to mine gold in Wales as it does in Australia or South Africa and that makes the whole operation not viable. It has a great degree of purity though - add the historical aspect to that and you’ll see why the British royal family has their wedding rings fashioned from this gold. For generations, this has been a tradition and though the mines might just become a fact of history, the gold lives on – in the best of company.

Everyone, but everyone seems to be under the impression that the ring on Lindsay Lohan’s finger is an engagement ring. Her representative and her father however, are quick to refute this and say that it isn’t true. They say that it is just an antique ring that Lindsay picked up somewhere. Someone very close to Lindsay’s mother says that it is just another of Lindsay’s cocktail rings. She goes on to say that it should be seen as one of Lindsay’s quirks – to wear a ring like that and watch in amusement as she sets the rumour mills going.

People in the Hollywood party circuit however, choose to believe otherwise. DJ Samantha Ronson seems to be very clear that Lindsay is going to be Mrs. Ronson before the year is out. Lindsay’s diamond engagement ring has a heart shaped diamond in the centre and she has been spotted wearing it when she was out with Samantha. It was also on her finger a few days ago at a red carpet function.

The rumours about the two have sparked off speculation that this lesbian wedding is on the cards in the near future. Samantha has said so to the press and though Lindsay has not issued any official statement to the press thus far, the two seem to be very much in love and are seen around town very often.

That’s what the market forecast is for the US alone. It is estimated that even though there is a recession on, the spending on diamond engagement rings has not gone down as some had forecast they would. Instead there seems to be a surge in spending on both engagement rings as well as wedding rings. This is over and above the rise in prices of diamonds and precious metals.

So can we infer that more people are getting engaged or married? Or are more people getting engaged and married more often? Or are they just spending a lot more on their diamond engagement rings, wedding rings and other jewellery as well?

This study was done by The Wedding Report in the US and it states that the expected rise is going to be over 13% in the next five years. It has also predicted that most of the wedding as well as the engagement rings will be set with diamonds and the metal used will be white gold. And some trivia from this study: they found that the most popular month for engagements was December and the most popular day when a man actually popped the question was Saturday.

In Orange County, California, there’s a novel scheme that is being put into operation. There’s a fundraising event that has been planned right through this month and it involves wedding rings. What the fundraising managers ask is that you donate your wedding ring if you’ve been divorced to this charity. The proceeds will go to drill twenty wells in Ghana to provide the people there with drinking water. To get to the water, the wells need to be dug deep and involve equipment and labour.

The With This Ring foundation was founded last year by Ali Eastburn when she sold her wedding ring and made the first donation. With so many high profile marriages and divorces in Orange County, it is to be hoped that break-ups will be a lot more than just fodder for the newspapers – and it will help fund this organization’s attempts at helping people who need it to live better lives. Ever since this organization has been founded, so many women have come forward with their wedding rings, enough for three deep wells to be sunk. What a wonderful way to make the bitterness of a divorce turn to charity!

He’s the president of the Alaska Treasure Seekers and if you lose your diamond engagement ring like Tracy Dahl did in Alaska, he’s the man to go to. Tracy was walking along when her engagement ring suddenly flew off from her finger and fell into the marshy grass. She looked as best she could all over for the platinum band which was set in the centre with a princess-cut diamond but it was of no avail. She marked the spot with a ribbon tied to the fence.

Then someone told her about Dennis Lundine who was known to be great at finding things that were lost. For 30 years, this 61 year old man had been finding lost items with the help of metal detectors – and his speciality was – you guessed it – engagement rings. So off he went to the spot where Tracy had lost her ring and in a few weeks, she had her ring back. And no, he refused to be paid for it because for him it’s the challenge that drives him.

He’s found old coins, lost keys, false teeth and even an unexploded bomb. He’s also found a very expensive heirloom ring. It’s all in a day’s work for him and the others in his club.

The lost engagement ring we wrote about two days ago has been found and Lisa Leavis is one happy woman. Lisa had been walking along the pavement outside the Jackson Gray Building in Portsmouth when she lost her rings. She didn’t realise till much later that they had fallen out of the necklace where she wore them because they didn’t fit her anymore.

Here is where Providence stepped in. John Procopio who parked his car at the Jackson Gray parking lot saw the sun catch something on the ground. When he bent down, he saw that it looked like a diamond ring. He picked it up, put it away in his pocket and went about his work. When he got home, he looked at it closely and found that it was indeed a diamond ring.

It just so happened that his wife had been reading about Lisa’s loss so when he told her about it, they straight away e-mailed Lisa. Lisa of course is delirious with joy. She’s sorry she didn’t get her wedding band back but she’s happy about her diamond engagement ring. The ring is at the jeweller’s where it’s going to be redone to fit her and she says it’s never going to leave her finger again.

There have been so many happy lost and found diamond engagement ring stories we’ve written about. We’re glad this one has a happy ending too.

The news in Hollywood is that Beyonce and Jay-Z are married. Neither of them is telling but that’s what everyone believes. However, just yesterday, Beyonce Knowles was spotted at the Radio City Music Hall in New York proudly showing off her diamond engagement ring which had a massive 18 carat diamond in it.

Now though the couple have been together for a while, this is the very first time that the singer is showing off an engagement ring. Estimated to be worth over £2 million, all we can say is that Jay-Z just knew what kind of diamond to pick. Jeweller Lorraine Schwartz was the designer who designed the ring and she has been the designer to a number of other famous Hollywood celebrities as well.

Have the singer and the rapper tied the knot? It’s hard to tell – there’s been so much speculation – but we do know they’re engaged – just take a look at the size of that ring!

In Porstmouth, Lisa was entering a building, fiddling with a stack of papers when she heard a sound on the pavement. Dismissing it as probably nothing, she went through her workday. It was only at night when she was getting ready to go to bed that she realised that both her diamond engagement ring and the wedding ring had fallen out of her necklace.Lisa had put on a bit of weight since having her children and she wore her rings around her neck. She had been meaning to get them resized but had just never got round to doing so. It really shook her up and she and her husband spent hours looking around on the street as well as in the office but there have been no sign of those two rings. Her wedding band was a band of white gold with princess cut baguettes in it. The engagement ring was a round ½ carat diamond in a 6-prong white gold setting.After so many stories this year of engagement rings being lost and then miraculously found again, we do hope Lisa finds hers too. She’s sentimental about those rings and she is hoping the person who found it is nice enough to return it.

According to GemEx Systems Inc, New York, a survey they did seems to indicate that whatever the state of the economy, the sale of diamond rings is not going to get affected too much. In fact, 85% of the respondents said that they would go ahead with plans of proposing, without letting the downturn in the economy affect them.

Considering that most of them felt that they should spend anything from one to three months’ salary on a diamond engagement ring, with some feeling that even more should be spent, this news comes as a bit of a surprise. Obviously, men feel that in spite of money going to be bit tight in the coming years, they put a high value on their engagement.

Most of them also felt that they would be very affronted if their fiancées were brutally honest, said they didn’t like the ring and wanted to exchange it. There seems to be a lot of emotion involved here and that perhaps is why men don’t look at the economic angle when it comes to proposing – heart over head seems to be the way it’s going!

Sir Bob Geldof’s daughter, Peaches, is in the news for all the wrong reasons and her famous father is absolutely livid. She and US rocker, Max Drummey were supposed to have exchanged wedding rings at a simple, quiet ceremony in a Las Vegas wedding chapel. Nothing really to get all excited about except that Peaches had, just a short while ago, declared undying love for Faris Badwan, The Horrors frontman. So what is the story behind this sudden wedding?

Most people seem to feel that it is a publicity stunt. Max and his band Chester French were totally unknown in this part of the world but after the wedding, they seem to have had a number of gigs all over the UK tied up. So was it just to give him some UK exposure that the hurried wedding was planned? Well, the rumours abound, especially as Max was seen playing without his wedding ring on. His explanation was that it got in the way of his guitar playing. She hasn’t got her wedding ring on either – now we wonder what her reason will be!

The offshoot of this is that her father has summoned her to his Majorca villa for an explanation. So will the wedding be on, or off or ‘not sure’?