Diamond Engagement Rings

Ever wondered how far your diamond travelled before it got to you? Diamonds are found in the earth or even in rivers or under the sea. When they are deep within the earth, they need to be mined and this can be very hard work, digging deep into the earth till they find these rough gemstones.

Most diamonds then make their way to Antwerp in Belgium as this city still reigns supreme when it comes to diamond trading. From here, it travels all the way to India where the stones are cut and polished, then back to Europe. When it comes to the rough diamonds, over 80% pass through Belgium and around 50% of the polished stones do too. So this really is the diamond hub of the world.

India has had a long legacy of diamond cutting and polishing, right from way back during the time of the maharajahs. Most of the work is done in three places: Gujarat, Mumbai or Jaipur. The exports last year were in the region of over £12 billion and it seems to be growing at about 20% yearly. There was a time when Antwerp was a cutting and polishing centre as well but more and more of this part of the diamond processing is moving to India.

So the next time you look at your diamond engagement ring, pause and ponder a moment as to the very long journey it has been on before it was set in a ring for your finger.

Whatever Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel do is news. Now when it concerns both of them and when they’re going to get engaged or married, it’s headline material. The trouble is, there are so many rumours floating around, there’s just no knowing what’s true and what’s not anymore.

Here’s the latest. Justin is said to have taken Jessica to Rome for a holiday and bought her a vintage diamond ring there. And where do you think this reportedly happened? In a tiny store in a little street where the jewellery is said to be mostly fine old vintage pieces. They can afford to have an unmarked store no doubt because they are so exclusive. According to the owner, the couple chose the ring as well as a vintage necklace and asked him to have it delivered to their hotel room. The diamond engagement ring is supposed to be a multi carat one.

You will no doubt remember the earlier rumours when it seemed that Justin was all set to pop the question and it was said he had bought Jessica a ring after having consulted with her friends as to what kind of a diamond engagement ring she would like. Nothing came of it so we’re not sure whether this rumour will go the way of all the others where this couple is concerned.

It’s been almost a year since Jennifer Hudson and David Otunga have been seeing each other. Well, they feel they’ve had enough time together to be sure about what they want and the singer announced their engagement, or rather her representative announced it to the press. It happened last Friday in Los Angeles , according to reports.

David Otunga is a reality television star and he acts in ‘I Love New York 2’. He’s hardly ever called David by those close to him and most call him Punk. Apparently his proposal came with a Neil Lane diamond engagement ring on Jennifer’s 27th birthday.

Jennifer Hudson who was one of the finalists in the top rated US TV show, American Idol, also shot into fame as an actress in the movie, Dreamgirls. She won an Oscar for her role and her dream now is to win a Grammy – she’s hoping to do that with her debut album that will release later this year.

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!

When Nicollette Sheridan appeared in public without her diamond engagement ring, it signalled the end of her engagement obviously. This Desperate Housewives star had been in a relationship with the musician Michael Bolton for a while. Theirs has been an on-off kind of romance for so long. They were a couple for many years in the nineties and then met up again three years ago. They’ve been engaged for two.

However, it doesn’t look like there is any bitterness and it seems to have been an amicable split. She is busy with her TV show which is entering its fifth season and everyone expected them to announce their wedding soon. However, her appearances without her diamond engagement ring seem to very clearly signal the fact that there’s going to be no wedding ring.

This time however, it was just the diamond, not the whole ring. Crystal Jardine from Bathurst got engaged four months ago. She works as a bartender at the Squire Green Golf Course and on a particularly busy Saturday, she realised that the diamond at the centre of her diamond engagement ring was missing. It could have fallen anywhere because she had been all around the greens, on the patio, in the kitchen. She also was aware that finding it was one chance in a million – maybe less.

As luck would have it, her fiancé was playing golf on that day and when she called him to tell him, he joined in the search too even though it seemed so futile. Then fate stepped in. There were some people on the patio and a child there found the diamond and was playing with it. Thinking it was a piece of glass and he could get hurt, it was taken away but one of the ladies there put it into her camera case just in case it was worth something – in which case, someone would be looking for it.

What a stroke of luck! Crystal and her diamond have been re-united and the ring has gone to the jeweller’s to be reset. She is so grateful to the Lynn, the lady who found it. Quite a fairytale ending, that.