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Moissanite and diamond look similar across a room. Up close, they sparkle differently. The real differences are in the physics, the price, and whether anyone around you will care. Here's the honest comparison from a shop that sells both. What moissanite actually is Moissanite is silicon carbide (SiC). It was first identified in 1893 by Henri Moissan in a meteor crater in Arizona, but virtually all moissanite sold today is lab-created. It's not a diamond imitation in the way cubic zirconia is — it's a distinct mineral with its own optical and physical properties. It just happens to look close...

The setting is the metal structure that holds your diamond or gemstone. It determines how the ring looks on the finger, how much light the stone gets, how secure it is during daily wear, and how easy (or hard) the ring is to resize and repair later. Most people spend hours choosing the stone and 30 seconds choosing the setting. That's backwards. Prong setting The most common setting by a wide margin. Metal claws (usually 4 or 6) grip the stone from the sides, leaving the top, bottom, and most of the perimeter exposed. This lets the maximum amount of...

Most gold jewelry just needs warm water, a drop of dish soap, and five minutes. That's it. The problem isn't that cleaning is hard — it's that people reach for the wrong products (toothpaste, baking soda, commercial dips) and end up scratching or discolouring pieces that were fine before they tried to "clean" them. Here's what actually works, what to avoid, and when to stop DIY and bring it to a jeweller. The only method you need for solid gold This works on 10K, 14K, 18K, and 22K solid gold. Rings, chains, bracelets, pendants. What you need: A small bowl,...

Three thousand dollars is right around the median engagement ring spend in Canada. It's enough to get a genuinely good ring with a real diamond centre stone, not a placeholder you'll want to swap out in two years. The question is where to put the money: bigger stone and simpler setting, or smaller stone with better metalwork? Here's how to think about it, plus actual rings from our shop that fall in that range. Where your $3,000 actually goes An engagement ring has three cost components: the centre stone, the metal, and the labour (design, casting, setting, finishing). At the...

Gold is having a moment. Or more accurately, gold is having several moments at once. Yellow gold is back in a way we haven't seen since the late '80s. Chunky chains are outselling delicate ones for the first time in years. And mixing metals in a single outfit, something that used to make people nervous, is now the whole point. At Vanhess Jewellery in Coquitlam, we've watched these shifts happen in real time across our repair bench, our custom orders, and what walks out the door. Here's what's actually happening with gold in 2026, what's worth paying attention to, and...

Four rules that actually make ring stacks work — anchor pieces, width variation, metal repetition, and a sensible cap on ring count. Plus how to stack around an engagement ring and why midi rings never quite work.