Etsy Monday: Chocolate Diamonds

'Tis the season for hot chocolate!  It is also the season for proposals.  I read somewhere that one third of all marriage proposals happen over the holidays.  There never seem to be any sources cited for this, so I cannot completely confirm it.  I definitely think it is plausible though.

Getting back to the hot chocolate...

Here are some chocolate diamond rings from Etsy in varying price ranges.  If you are curious about learning more about chocolate diamonds, please refer to this GIA article on "Fancy" diamonds.

Rich Chocolate Diamonds Ring - $38

(The designer of the Rich Chocolate ring has many other similar rings with different stones.  Perfect for stacking!) 

Radiant Cut Chocolate Diamond Ring - $1,585

Chocolate Diamond Ring with Rose Gold and White Gold Twisted Shank - $4,074

Diamonds: Lost and Found

If you need a midweek pick-me-up, a story to give you a little faith, here is a heart warming tale of a woman whose diamond fell out of her setting in a motorcycle accident.  The path to finding her diamond is touching.  I am not even going to try to summarize it, read the whole thing here.

Diamonds: A Lovely Tweet

If you ask me for my favorite thing about diamonds, I would probably reply about how much I love to watch them sparkle.

A few days ago @GIAnews had a profound tweet:

Jewelry is more than just a sum of its parts: it dazzles the eye, expresses emotion and declares your status. 

Take "status" as you wish, but in my mind it means: taken, given myself to someone for eternity, or loved dearly.  Obviously, you don't need jewels or other expensive things to show that you are loved dearly or to express your emotion.  Sometimes the look in someone's eye is enough.  

P.S. Follow me on twitter: RingDrunk!

Diamonds: Amazon vs. Blue Nile

When really bored, after I have caught up on Post Secret, Best-of-Craigslist, and a few of my other favorites, I sometimes find my way to Blue Nile or Amazon.com checking out diamonds.  Why?  Well, you always want what you can't have.

I decided to do a little quantitative analysis between the two sites.  It would be extremely difficult to find two diamonds with all of the same characteristics, so I focused on round diamonds and the main four characteristics: carat, cut, clarity and color (varying, very good, VS1, H).  I looked at diamonds from both websites that met these characteristics.  If the site had multiple of each increment, I selected the diamond with the lowest cost. Below are my results.  As you can see, Amazon was a little bit cheaper 'til it got to the heavy hitter, the 2.0 ct, when it was substantially cheaper.  Worthy of note, Amazon's selection was smaller than Blue Nile's, at least for these increments.

	Amazon	Blue Nile
0.5 ct	$1,340	$1,345
1.0 ct	$5,395	$5,815
1.5 ct	$11,245	$11,780
2.0 ct	$20,535	$27,230