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Three customers a week ask us some version of the same question: how do I get a bigger looking ring without paying for a bigger stone. There are three honest answers, and the jewellery trade has been using all of them for a long time. A halo, a cluster, and an illusion setting each buy visible size for less money. Each one also charges you something in return, and the charge usually arrives years later at a repair counter rather than at the till. Here is what each approach gives you and what it takes back. The three approaches, defined...

Most wedding jewellery problems are scheduling problems. The ring is beautiful, the engraving is what you wanted, the size is right, and the piece is still on our bench the week of the wedding. Every stage of jewellery work has a real duration, and several of them have to happen in a fixed order. Here is the calendar we give couples in Coquitlam, counting backwards from the wedding date. Why counting backwards works better Forward planning hides the dependencies. Engraving cannot start until sizing is finished, and sizing cannot be confirmed until you have worn the ring for a week....

Near the bottom of every GIA diamond report is a line most buyers skip. It says Fluorescence, and beside it one of five words. That line confuses more shoppers than the colour and clarity grades put together, and it is the one place on the report where a careful buyer can pay less for the same stone. People walk in having read that fluorescence ruins a diamond, or that it is free whiteness. Both stories are too simple. What fluorescence is Some diamonds glow when ultraviolet light hits them. Ultraviolet is a kind of light your eye cannot see, present...

Somebody takes off a necklace and there is a red band across the back of their neck. Or earrings that felt fine for a week start to itch. We have this conversation at our counter most weeks, and the answer is usually simpler than people fear. It comes down to which metals sit in the alloy, and which parts of a piece touch skin the longest. This is a buying guide for the person doing the shopping. What actually causes the reaction Nickel is the first suspect and deserves to be. A 2019 clinical review in Contact Dermatitis states that...

Almost every wedding band conversation starts with the outside: the metal, the width, the finish. The inside gets no attention at all. That is backwards. The inside is in contact with your skin for every hour you own the ring, and its shape decides whether the band is comfortable, what size you need, how much gold you are paying for, and how hard it is to resize later. The two profiles, plainly A standard fit band, also called a flat fit, has a flat inner wall. Hold it up and the inside is a straight cylinder. The full width of...

A customer brought us a ring last spring with an emerald that had a white line running through it. The line was not there a month earlier. She had bought a small ultrasonic cleaner online, dropped the ring in for five minutes, and pulled out a stone with a fracture that now reached the surface and had gone pale where the oil had left it. Nothing was wrong with the machine. The emerald had a natural break inside it from the day it came out of the ground, and the cleaner found it. This is the most common avoidable damage...