Beyoncé Knowles

source: people.com

Beyoncé and Jay-Z concealed their marriage for a while after tying the knot in April of 2008. Though a little non-traditional where the silhouette of wedding bands are concerned, her wedding ring truly knocks the socks off many others. This 18 carat, flawless diamond ring by Lorraine Schwartz is worth over $5 million. She showed it off for the first time in a number honoring Etta James at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall.

Source: ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com

Marilyn Monroe
Diamonds are a girl’s best friend, indeed. Marilyn’s eternity wedding ring, featuring 35 diamonds, was placed on her finger by Joe DiMaggio. It was one of very few real pieces of among her jewelry. Though she and Joe divorced, they remained friends and were rumored to be planning to re-marry soon before she died. Joe never married again and Marilyn’s ring was sold at a Christie’s auction in 1999. It was bought for $770,000.

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Kate Middleton
While it has been much publicized that Prince William won’t be wearing a wedding ring, Kate certainly will. Though the Prince gave Kate his mother’s ring for their engagement, the Queen Mum herself provided them with a wedding band for Kate’s finger. The wedding ring was created by the family jewelers in Wales. It was made from a nugget of Welsh gold and given to William by his grandmother not long after he and Kate announced their engagement.

Katy Perry

Source:novafm.com.au

Katy married Russell Brand in late 2010, in a traditional Hindu wedding ceremony in Rajasthan, India. Their wedding rings are just

as unique as the couple. The elaborate rings are wide, dark platinum bands set with over 100 yellow, champagne, and cognac diamonds, and ring in at an estimated $75,000 each.

Eva Longoria

Source: bigfatcake.com

Eva has a history of loving Piaget jewelry. In July of 2007, Eva and hubby Tony Parker exchanged Piaget Possession rings during a fairy tale wedding in Paris, in Saint Germain L’Auxerrois Church. The rings were engraved with personal messages inscribed in French. Her ring, valued at $25,000 was made of white gold and set with over two carats’ worth of brilliant cut diamonds and three carats of square cut diamonds. It features 107 gems: 80 brilliant cut diamonds arranged in two rows around the ring with the 27 square cut stones in between. Tony’s ring, a little less pricy at $1400, was more simple while staying very elegant – an 18k white gold band.

If you are thinking about popping the question, you’ve probably also started thinking about engagement rings. Luckily for you, here is the simplest guide ever to finding the diamond engagement rings and wedding bands in the way that will work best for you. Once you decide which shopping approach is best for you and your soon-to-be fiancée, you’ll be on your way to making that purchase—with your sanity intact.

Heirloom. If you have a diamond engagement ring that’s been in your family for generations, you may have the perfect engagement ring on your hands, preloaded with sentimental family history and symbolism. Start by getting the ring professionally cleaned. If the setting still looks shabby, or the center stone is dull and poorly cut, it may be a better idea to either reset the center stone in a new setting or purchase a loose diamond to rejuvenate a classic setting.

National Chain Store. National chains, those stores at the mall with the shiny displays and perky salespeople, are convenient, and generally have a pretty wide range of setting styles. However, the salespeople may not know an awful lot about diamonds, which can be frustrating when you are trying to invest in the perfect loose diamond. Also, remember that the cost of all those sexy commercials is worked into the cost of your ring.

Independent Jeweler. Independent bricks-and-mortar jewelry shops can offer impeccable customer service, a wealth of knowledge about loose diamonds and settings, and often throw in perks like free cleanings. On the other hand, they tend to have the smallest selection of stones and settings of any engagement ring source, and their prices reflect the high cost of running an independent shop. Before you buy from an independent jeweler, make sure that he is trustworthy and sells only certified diamonds.

Online Retailers. More and more customers are turning to the Web for their engagement rings, for several reasons. First, the selection at an Internet-based store is much better than at a bricks-and-mortar. Second, without the costs of running a physical store, online retailers can offer certified loose diamonds, settings and rings online at significantly better prices. Some customers appreciate communicating with diamond experts via live chat or email instead of in a store, while others enjoy the convenience of literally being able to buy the engagement ring or wedding band wherever and whenever they feel like it.

A tension set  ring is one where the entire ring acts as one large spring holding the diamond in place.  Since there is no metal bridging the gap where the diamond is being held the diamond appears to float in air and you get a beautiful unobstructed view of the stone.

Furthermore, because of the placement of the two solid ends, as opposed to the four or six and up to twelve claws or prongs you see in traditional settings, tension set wedding rings for women  allow much more light to enter the diamond or other precious stone, thereby increasing the brilliance of the stone.

Tension rings, therefore,  need to be designed with not only with heavy gauge metal, but also special alloying, hardening and treatment processes for the necessary strength to hold the stone in place.  Common metals used in tension set rings include titanium due to its strength and durability as well as platinum, white and yellow gold of around 18 or 14 karat.

Pure 22 karat gold would likely not be suitable due to its softness.  Because of the pressure of the tension setting, stones need to be hardness on the MOS scale of 8 or more, which means that only the very hardest stones such as diamonds, rubies, and sapphires can be used in this setting style.

Additionally, stones used in tension settings must be of excellent quality with absolutely no cracks, fractures or faults.  The classic designs are often the simplest and a round diamond held within the band is considered the best by many but other options such as angled settings are becoming more popular.

Disadvantages

If you are planning to buy wedding rings online, you will notice that tension rings in general a more expensive than traditional rings, as tension rings use two to three times the amount of metal.  At the same time there is less protection to the girdle of the stone so if the tension setting is not properly set the stone may not hold.

Therefore, tension settings are recommended for less active people or for special occasions only but not every day wear.  Another downside is that a tension set rings cannot be effectively re-sized.  This is due to the inherent properties of any metal with a spring characteristic.

It’s the spring property of the metal that literally squeezes against opposing sides of the stone, thus the term tension set.  To alter the size of such a ring by conventional methods creates in the metal a portion that will not be capable of imparting the force needed to effectively hold the stone in place.  Finally, tension setting rings are not something any jeweler can just make; they have to be customized for a specific diamond as well as finger size and are usually only obtainable at exclusive jewelry designers.

Red Diamond

Red is the color of passion. Diamond is a girl’s best friend. A combination of the two, then, gives you an irresistible, beautiful and extremely rare gem. Colored diamonds, such as pink, black and blue, are very rare, and red diamond is one of the rarest.

Natural red diamonds are so rare, that many jewelers have never even seen one! Needless to say, that red diamonds are so rare that most people will never get to own one either. Recently, different methods of enhancing diamonds, which basically means changing their color, have been developed. The process probably recreates the conditions that existed many years ago to produce natural fancy colored diamonds. Treatments on enhanced fancy colors include irradiating them, which causes the color to change. This is followed by a heat treatment in order to stabilize the color.

It is almost impossible to find a pure red diamond, without any hues, and as a result, red diamond prices are extremely high. Some combinations of red diamonds include fancy purplish red, fancy brownish red, and the rarest, which is simply pure red.

Since natural red diamonds are so rare, yet so beautiful, many people choose to buy different gems that resemble red diamond. Probably the most popular red jewelry is the Ruby. Rubies are extremely elegant and royal, and are worn by royalty and celebrities all over the world. Prices of rubies are primarily determined by color. The brightest “red” called “pigeon blood-red,” takes considerable precedence over other rubies of similar quality. Indeed, rubies are a great substitute for those who absolutely love red diamond and red jewelry in general, since rubies are not only stunning, they are also quite common.

Pink Diamond

Who said the (copiously) rich and (mega) famous have it all? We all know that money cannot buy everything; it can’t buy love, can’t buy true friends, can’t buy happiness, and so forth. However, if you are Mariah Carey, the world’s biggest selling female artist in history, it can help you attain any creature comfort you can imagine, like super-luxurious pink diamond! Mariah Carey, one of Hollywood’s ten richest women, has been seen sporting stunning pink diamond and sapphire ring pop and a gorgeous 17-carat pink diamond engagement ring.

Mariah Carey, 40, and husband Nick Cannon, 29, tied the knot two years ago, and for their second anniversary they resolved to renew their vows: “If you were married to Mariah Carey, you’d want to marry her every year too,” a euphoric Nick tells USMagazine.com. Carey is known for her love of girlish things, like butterflies, rainbows, and anything pink. For their second anniversary, then, Cannon decided it would be a good idea to purchase the missus the gorgeous pink diamond and sapphire ring pop.

But the luxurious pink diamond and sapphire ring pop is dwarfed compared to Mariah’s epicurean 17-carat pink diamond engagement ring. Mariah, whose net worth is estimated at well over $200 million, knows how to “live it large;” private jets, boats, houses in NY and LA and much more are all part of her routine. Her pink diamond engagement ring is but a mere addition to this routine. The ring’s value is said to be $2.5 million, and Mariah said the pink diamond is “so clear, you can see [her] finger right through it.” The ring  has an emerald-cut fancy light pink centre stone surrounded by 58 intense pink diamonds, flanked by two half-moon diamonds, with the centre stone alone being 10 carats and just a little smaller than a dime.

Diamonds come in a variety of colors- gray, white, blue, yellow, orange, red, green, brown, black, purple and pink. Pink diamonds are one of the rarest and most valuable diamonds, and natural pink diamonds (as opposed to enhanced), are so rare that many jewelers have never even seen one. It is no surprise that many other superstars, fancy it so much. Indeed, Mariah has taken “pretty in pink” to a new, mostly unattainable, level.

Blue Diamond

In their purest form, diamonds are colorless. Colorless means that the stone itself does not absorb any light, but reflects all of it back to the observer, causing him to see white light, or what the human eye interprets as colorless. Blue diamonds are actually diamonds that absorb all wavelengths of light except for blue. What makes a blue diamond absorb light are impurities in its molecular structure. In the specific case of a blue diamond, that impurity is an element known as boron.

Whereas carbon, the main element of diamond, has a quadruple bond capacity, boron can only make three bonds. Therefore, when a boron atom is stuck in the middle of a lattice of carbon atoms in a blue diamond, one carbon bond is left loose, giving light a little bit of an obstacle course bouncing around a floating orbital and out of the stone. The angles the light bounces, thanks to the structure of the carbon-boron bond, make it that the only light able to be reflected off the stone is blue, creating a blue diamond. The more boron impurities in a diamond lattice, the more intensely colored the blue diamondis.

Only .01 percent of all natural diamonds mined on Earth are colored. This makes sense, in light of the fact that boron is only present in .0001 percent of the earth’s crust. This gives a hundredfold disparity between colored diamonds in general andblue diamonds in particular. This is because there are many other impurities that can yield other colors in diamonds. Blue diamonds have to be in the exact right place at the exact right time to form with enough boron in their lattice to form the blue color that makes them so valuable. All it takes is 1 boron per every million carbon atoms to do the trick.

The most famous of the blue diamonds above the earth’s crust today is the Hope Diamond. Just as with any stone that has traversed history, nobody knows where the blue diamond came from, but people speculate India. This blue diamond was passed around for centuries, ended up with Louis XIV, the Sun King who reigned for over 70 years in pre-revolution France, and was then stolen from the French royal treasury, recut, and the blue diamond somehow ended up in Washington D.C.

As for the element responsible for the blue in blue diamonds, boron continues to get the short end of the deal. But, as the cartoon Futurama often used to advertise in its heyday, “Nobody Doesn’t Like Molten Boron!”

Colored Diamonds

When it’s time to buy colored diamond, be it an engagement ring, earrings, bracelet, necklace or even men’s jewelry, much thought and effort are put into the endeavor. The reason is that diamonds are an expensive matter and one must take different factors into account, aside from the initial challenging budgetary decision: the color, cut, clarity and carat weight, also known as the 4 c’s, are all things that affect the price of the diamond. For many, the color of the diamond plays the most important role in their search, often because they are uninterested in standard colorless diamond, but, rather, in colored diamond.

Fancy colored diamonds come in a variety of colors, including steel gray, black, yellow, blue, pink, red, purple, green and all intermediate shades. Natural colored diamonds get their colors in different ways. For example, green diamonds become green as a result of radiation during the diamond’s creation, while yellow diamonds are produced as a result of trace nitrogen. However, not all colored diamonds are natural, and some result from different color manipulations.

Oftentimes, gemologists take undesirable diamonds and alter their color. In this way, for example irradiation is used followed by a high-heat treatment in order to turn sallow diamonds into much more vivid and rich colored diamonds.

It comes as no surprise that many celebrities choose colored diamonds over standard ones. For one, colored diamonds are, in many people’s opinion, more beautiful and regal (of course many would disagree with this statement). Additionally,Natural colored diamonds are much more rare than colorless, and Hollywood represents the trendy, expensive and inaccessible. And colored diamonds are all of the above.

Because natural colored diamonds are so rare and can be rather exorbitant, diamond treatments (namely, color manipulations) are very common. If you are no diamond-expert, and colored diamond has always been your dream, do not be disappointed if you quickly realize that you budget would not allow you to go for natural colored diamond. However, don’t be dissuaded; although artificial, these color manipulations still make truly beautiful colored diamonds more accessible and  possible for more of us to own. Whenever you shop around for colored diamond, always assume that any affordable fancy color diamond you may eye has been treated in some way to enhance its color and other characteristics. If you do wish to procure a natural colored diamond, you should ask for a lab certificate to verify the authenticity of any color diamond marketed as natural.

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