Buying Loose Diamonds Online

[BlackDog]

Originally Posted by Commander Quan

Is this for an engagement ring? One of the fun (stressful) parts about going through the process off picking out the diamond for my fiancee was actually looking at different stones.

Josh, congratulations on your upcoming engagement. I wish you and your bride much happiness together.

If I may digress for a minute, I had a really neat experience when I bought my wife's engagement ring. All during my growing-up years on Long Island my neighbor across the street, Mr. Chevalier, was a jewelery maker for a very famous NYC jeweler. By the time I got engaged, he was an older man, and was retired, although he kept a small workshop in his home. (He was an immigrant from France, and had served stateside in WWII, and during his off hours made glass eyes for soldiers who lost an eye during combat.)

Anyhow, he said that he would make the engagement ring for me, and how much did I want to spend. I gave him the figure, and that my wife wanted a quality diamond rather than a large diamond. He told me to come with him to NYC one morning. We took the train into Manhattan, and went to a coffee shop where we met an Hassidic Jew who was a diamond dealer and an acquaintance of Mr. Chevalier. The diamond dealer had a small drawstring bag of diamonds in his pocket, and over coffee Mr. Chevalier looked at diamonds and haggled over prices. Finally told me this is the one we want to buy for my engagement ring. They tried showing me how one diamond differed in quality from another, but frankly I never really caught on.

A week or so later my ring was complete, and he had put two small diamonds on the ring as well, as a gift to us for our engagement. My wife still wears this ring 23 years later.

[white_s2k]

Originally Posted by BlackDog

Josh, congratulations on your upcoming engagement. I wish you and your bride much happiness together.

If I may digress for a minute, I had a really neat experience when I bought my wife's engagement ring. All during my growing-up years on Long Island my neighbor across the street, Mr. Chevalier, was a jewelery maker for a very famous NYC jeweler. By the time I got engaged, he was an older man, and was retired, although he kept a small workshop in his home. (He was an immigrant from France, and had served stateside in WWII, and during his off hours made glass eyes for soldiers who lost an eye during combat.)

Anyhow, he said that he would make the engagement ring for me, and how much did I want to spend. I gave him the figure, and that my wife wanted a quality diamond rather than a large diamond. He told me to come with him to NYC one morning. We took the train into Manhattan, and went to a coffee shop where we met an Hassidic Jew who was a diamond dealer and an acquaintance of Mr. Chevalier. The diamond dealer had a small drawstring bag of diamonds in his pocket, and over coffee Mr. Chevalier looked at diamonds and haggled over prices. Finally told me this is the one we want to buy for my engagement ring. They tried showing me how one diamond differed in quality from another, but frankly I never really caught on.

A week or so later my ring was complete, and he had put two small diamonds on the ring as well, as a gift to us for our engagement. My wife still wears this ring 23 years later.

Thanks for sharing. I think I'd rather have a story to tell years later than to save $400 buying a diamond online unseen.

[chippewastud79]

Blue Nile and other online stores offer great prices because there is no guarantee they are selling what they say they are.

I must preface this by saying I am no expert, I have just spent a lot of time with a wholesale jeweler, with over 30 years in the business, who happens to supply well over 16,000 shops with their diamonds.

It works like this. All diamonds when they come in are immediately and automatically grouped into a broad category of the 4 C's and then are put into a cache of similar diamonds before they are sold. The certificates are pre-determined and the diamonds that most closely fit the certifications are given to them. The diamonds will appear to be what they say they are to an untrained person (you or I) but a true jeweler will tell you that most of these diamonds are far from what they claim them to be.

Ask the jeweler to see the chart that they have for determining retail prices. It is called the Rapaport (I believe), a quarterly report put out by the diamond authority that determines retail price. A lot of them will choose not to show it to you and rather punch in a whole bunch of numbers to a calculator and then show you a huge number and then say something like "And you get a special 60% off discount" and hit a few more keys and show you a final price. All retail prices are more or less predetermined based on the 4 C's, but it is no where near what the whole sale price is, so haggle, haggle, haggle.

If you are buying loose, put them all on the table next to one another and look at them with the jewelers magnifying glass. If you can't see the differences, go with the best looking and cheapest diamond. A friend of mine put two diamonds right next to each other with a $2000 difference and couldn't see the difference, and clearly chose the cheaper option.

I do like the option of buying loose because you can make it into the perfect piece of jewelry for your future fiance. I had a basic idea of what she wanted (3 stone, not a plain band, and round cuts) and worked my way backwards by picking out a ring style and then the diamonds to fit in it based on my price range.

Oh and metal. If you are looking for something with the silver color, skip white gold and platinum. White gold is essentially bleached yellow gold and will always turn increasingly yellow over time. Platinum is very nice, but expensive and scratches easily. Try paladium, it is whiter and brighter than white gold and will not scratch near as easy as platinum and the price is less than half of platinum and only slightly more expensive than gold. Some jewelers do not use this metal, but it is on the periodic table and is a precious metal just like the other two.

If any of this doesn't make sense feel free to PM or ask any clarification questions. Hope this helped and I don't seem like a complete moron with endless drivel.

Best of luck with the purchase

[Commander Quan]

Here is a semi current price list for round diamonds just to give you an idea.

http://www.mor-brothers.com/PriceLis...tPriceList.pdf

[chippewastud79]

Originally Posted by Commander Quan

Here is a semi current price list for round diamonds just to give you an idea.

http://www.mor-brothers.com/PriceLis...tPriceList.pdf

Nice find there Quan, exactly what I was talking about. Might be a good idea to be armed with the Rapaport ahead of time

[PeteSB75]

Originally Posted by chippewastud79

Nice find there Quan, exactly what I was talking about. Might be a good idea to be armed with the Rapaport ahead of time

Rap sheets for several cuts: http://srdiamond.com.tw/jewelry/report_update/

Just keep in mind that the rap sheet is only about half of the equation in determining price. The real discussion is about the discount they give off the rap price. That is based on cut and on where within the half carat range the stone falls - bigger discount on 1.01 than on 1.49 - as well as how much they think they can get away with.

Best case scenario, tbh, is to deal with a jeweler that either you or a friend has done a good amount of business with. Mine gave me a fair, but not great deal on the stone, but then I got a white gold price on a platinum ring because of the business my coworkers had done with him in the past. Overall, I paid about 1200 or so for a setting that would have cost me 2-2.5k elsewhere.

[Commander Quan]

You can also save some major coin buy buying a slightly smaller stone. For instance if you were thinking about a 1 carat diamond instead go with a .95 you won't be able to tell the difference and it'll save you a lot more than buying online.

[white_s2k]

Wanted to give everyone who helped me out a quick update! After months of looking, dozens and dozens of trips to B&M jewelry stores, local shops, etc. I finally found the diamond I was looking for. Everyone who said, "Don't buy online, the experience of shopping around is worth the $400-$500 you might save" were absolutely right. I gained a ton of information and ended up having the ring custom made by a well known jewelry designer here in Dallas. We sat down with a pencil and paper, sketched out how I wanted the setting and they completed it in about 2-1/2 weeks. I proposed a few weeks ago and my girlfriend of 5 years said YES!! So once again, thanks to everyone who helped me along the way. The journey and time spent was well worth it!!!

Here's a pic I snapped, I suck at taking pictures