Regarding the wedding ring, I can understand slightly better how someone would put a bit more money into that, considering that you wear it for life. But there are so much better options than buying a shiny rock. Why not go to a goldsmith and pay 1000$ for a workshop where you forge your own rings? That will result in a lasting memory of a nice event, for a fraction of the cost, instead of throwing thousands of dollars out the window for a shiny rock that you simply buy at the store. Or maybe you don't even need gold? In my opinion, silver, titanium or maybe something like steel combined with carbon fibers looks better anyways.

Lab-grown diamonds, however, can be had for as low as 20% of the price of natural diamonds (for large sizes), often less than Moissanite, and absolutely look the part. You simply can't tell the difference between a lab-grown diamond and a natural diamond without highly specialized equipment because they are, well, the same thing and differ only in minute growth "marks" in their fine structure. If I'm not mistaken, there is regulation preventing companies from calling competitors' lab-grown diamonds "fake diamonds", and retailers can call them "real diamonds" (but NOT "natural diamonds").

I got my wife of 15 years a large lab-grown diamond ring from Ritani for ~2K and she loves it. She won't take it out. Everybody is blown away by it because an equivalent natural diamond ring would go for ~10-15K.

It all depends on what your partner wants obviously. If it's important for your partner to get a diamond ring and you value your partnership more than the cost of a diamond, then buy a diamond. If your partner wants a "I'm married" sign (as my wife did), just buy a simple wedding ring without a stone. If it's not that important for her, don't buy a ring.

> 3. A diamond is an illiquid asset, not an "investment". Don't believe me? Try to sell a second-hand diamond ring on eBay or at a pawn shop. Do you really think you'll get anything close to what you paid for it?

Yes you'll get close to what you paid for it if you buy it the same way jewelers buy it. There's an ultra liquid market for diamonds: a friend jeweler showed it to me. He needs a diamond to make a ring? He goes on a website where diamonds are sorted by their four Cs (clarity/cut/color/carat) and their price and all guaranteed legit. And he buys it at market price.

Of course if you overpay 3x the price by buying the diamond as part of a complete ring, you're sorry out of luck.

Now the diamond market may crash too, but that is another topic.

If your wife/fiance really insists on having a diamond: find a reputable jeweler and tell him you want to pick the stone with him, on such a site. And that you're willing willing to pay for the ring and his craftmanship but that you don't want to pay the stone 3x the price for what is actually two clicks for him.

Heck, you can even bring your own stone to the jeweler (I did it, with a family heirloom diamond). You can even bring a picture of a famous brand and say you want the same shape of ring: they're not supposed to do it but they'll gladly copy the famous ring (I didn't do that but I know someone who did).

BTW while you're at it buy a diamond that comes with a certificate.

And if you want to pay 1/5th of the price: then buy a lab-grown diamond instead of moissanite for 1/10th of the price. To me moissanite is a bit too shiny.

While a lab-grown diamond or a "real" diamond are the exact same thing.

See user glimshe 's comment in this thread.

When I was a teenager in the 1990s, and moissanite came out, I listened to my older cousin go off on how she would dump any man who tried to pass off a moissanite to her.

Then my mother kept confusing moissanite with cubic zirconia, and kept telling me stories about cheap men who bought their fiancées rings that broke.

I bought my wife a moissanite, but I was so afraid that she was just saying that she wanted a moissanite to merely humor me. What I did was give her matching moissanite earrings a month before I proposed to her. She loved the earrings, so I knew she'd love the ring.

While DeBeers and Madison Ave. crafted a tradition to artificially inflate the value of this specific gem, create a monopoly cartel around it, and established it as a material standard of love and "suitability" for marriage, it's been subsumed by culture as much as children demand Christmas such that the odds of escaping this manufactured foolishness are scant. For example, what % of women would date a man if they heard he was a Cornell grad vs. a self-employed electrician?

The individual has a Hobson choice to either follow a convention, pretend to follow it, or ignore it altogether. Without being subject to these peer pressures, I would prefer to allocate to coin to investments and reducing debt, and instead carve a ring from a wax blank to be cast in a metal like platinum or silver.

The non-salaried working man trying to enter marriage with the demands of a large wedding party and an expensive diamond ring bought on credit would be economically foot-gunning themselves. It still happens everyday and keeps the diamond business in business.

Gold on the other side, is impossible to reproduce and is a very rare metal that will have many fine uses. You can do anything to it and it won't lose its value. I will never understand why some women require worthless diamonds. It's a crystal, it reflects and will lose its value if broken.

> Man-made diamonds are forged from the will and brilliance of man.

> Millions of years of loving relationship have lead up this point and have been distilled into 2 carats of sparkling magic,

> brought forth from the ether of the universe by man's desire to express his love.

>

> Or you could dig up some dirty rock from the ground, like an animal would do.

https://twitter.com/missmayn/status/1612892354624786444

In any case. She's extremely happy. I'm happy. My wallet is happy. It's honestly the best decision.

The YAG stone is bright blue-green, and just as shiny as diamonds.

And on the upside, the local jewewer made it from the 3d printed wax cast, and the stone was grown by scientists.

No slave labor or child labor was used in any way.

Then there’s designer brands, which openly sell products of inferior quality. And with success too.

I guess diamonds are similar to both.

Wow, you can get a 3 carat, VVS1/VVS2, ideal cut, colorless for $3,000. That's a huge stone and very high quality.

That would be a $15,000+ diamond if natural.

I feel the same way. Moissanites are basically TOO good. They reflect light in so many carnival colors, and they shine so brightly, that they frequently look like fake carnival jewelry.

Yeah, same. They have too much bling and look exactly like something the nouveau riche would parade around. To make things worse, moissanite jewellery usually has too many gems, something you couldn't afford with diamond.

What's the point then?

A ring doesn't have to be expensive: you can get a nice titanium ring for under $100. And unlike some other rings, it has some major benefits: 1) it's super-lightweight, so you can barely feel it (gold is heavy), 2) it's hypo-allergenic, in case you might have a sensitivity to anything in other rings, and best of all, 3) if you're stuck in an undersea oil rig that's flooding and one of the automatic flood doors is closing and about to trap you inside, you can stick your hand with the ring in the door and prevent it from closing, so you can escape.

Another interesting approach is to reframe it as a Hobson choice with opportunity cost: Would you prefer a modest ring that's exciting for all of a week and is easy to lose, or a lifetime of memories of 3 weeks on a languid, secluded tropical island with surreal, warm white sand and ocean-to-plate candlelight dinners?

Very few advantages, if any, for most people (only big exception I'm aware of is for citizenship status).

When I was still in the dating game, I wasn't one of the desperate ones who needed to f*k desperately at all costs. Rather I was every single time looking for potentially working relationship, so evaluating compatibility and if I found obvious or already-known showstopper I finished it quickly. But how do you evaluate that when initially people automatically wear layers of politeness masks? Some of them even after years.

Well just wait for first conflict and misunderstanding to happen, and how the other side reacts when emotions are high. Masks are off, raw personality comes forward in bad situation. You just have to be realistic and also think how it would look like if tables turned.

Or don't, but I prefer to at least try to bring some smart into this highly emotional game, I mean divorce rates hanging uncomfortably around 50% come from something (my wife doesn't have any natural bloody diamond on her ring, we talked about it like mature people beforehand and both agreed we won't go that way)..

https://twitter.com/missmayn/status/1612892354624786444?lang...

Synthetic diamonds have already destroyed the big shiny rock as a display of wealth, but the marketing continues.

Yet, the world would be better if the same amount could be burnt on something with better externalities. If jewelry, then hand-made one.

... rethink whom you are marrying and maybe the practice of marriage itself.

I’m curious, how would you know the diamond you gave the jeweler was the same diamond they put into the ring, as a layman?

https://www.gphg.org/horlogerie/en/watches/antikythera-sunmo...

A Rolex has scarcity value, and can act as a deflationary asset is what's at play there.

I do believe they are having a correction right now as the luxury market starts to bottom.

Buying old Rolex watches is cult activity a bit like buying Elvis's shoes or such at auction for many thousands of dollars—although the latter is likely rarer and ultimately might be of historical interest in centuries to come. Same goes for other engineered products such as old Leicaflex cameras that have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars when equally engineered high quality products from the same era are simply junked as these days they are perceived to have no value.

It mystifies me why people are so enamored with this stuff. There's nothing special about an old Rolex except they were likely near the best of breed when manufactured, but they have little intrinsic historical value nowadays in that they were very unlikely to contain new technology that altered the course of mechanical engineering at the time they were made. They have never had the historical or technical importance of Harrison's remarkable chronometers which did alter the course of history.

Let me illustrate with an example: I own two of the first cavity magnetron developed during WWII that went into production and is credited with giving the Allies a huge technological advantage over the Axis Powers. Moreover, they are band new in their original cartons and in better condition than the one in this display model: https://www.theiet.org/membership/library-archives/the-iet-a.... (Background info: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260521102_The_Cavit...)

This is truly an historical device that altered history and changed technology—it made centimeter RADAR possible when desperately needed in WWII and it's the forerunner of the device in every microwave oven around the world—yet they're not worth a pinch of shit when compared with an old Rolex—even though there are precious few used ones still in existence (let alone brand new ones in original packaging).

Seems to me, like diamonds, the outrageous values of an old Rolex come from cleaver marketing to the gullible and to those with more money than sense.

Edit: years ago I bought a fake Rolex in Bangkok for about $20 as a joke, it actually kept reasonably good time and looked reasonably genuine—at least it did from a few feet away.