Q&A: “Your website is insanely helpful…”

I am in the market for an engagement ring and really know nothing. Your website is insanely helpful and led to try contacting you. I’m not 100% on what I want but near positive that i’m in the market for a simple solitaire on platinum or white gold. I really don’t know how much setting the stone will cost (and the band) but I’m really looking to spend less than $12,000. Any suggestions?

Thanks for everything you’ve provided with me so far.

I’m looking for a round diamond.

Thank you so much for the below suggestions. The first one looks great, or should I say looked great. By the time I opened it, someone had purchased it. I was embarrassed that I had waited a day to click on the link so decided to do a lot more research. I also saw a buddy’s diamond that was (allegedly) 1.5 carats and quite honestly didn’t look that big. So I decided to up my price point about 20% and now I’m looking to spend around 12-13.5k for the diamond.

Anyways I’ve been looking according to all the advice on your wonderful site and found this diamond:

https://www.jamesallen.com/diamonds/I-SI1-Excellent-Cut-Round-Diamond-1514114.asp

seems to good to be true. would you agree?

The diamond I saw was a round…I think

…….

I bought the diamond. Thanks again for all your help.

I received the diamond today and my first impression was that it was dazzlingly beautiful. the light danced crazy on it. I’m fine with the size and, as you know, it was a GIA rated Excellent cut but upon further review I couldn’t help but think it looked a bit “short”. Almost stubby, more “disc-like” than I envisioned. Closer to a chocolate chip shape than I was prepared for (though really not very disc-like or chocolate-chip-like at all, just more than I envisioned). Though I’m CERTAINLY overreacting (its kind of my nature) and keep waffling on it. I’ve been incessantly looking at pictures online and for a while I thought it was just that I had an incorrect “vision” of the perfect diamond in my mind. See this page:

https://www.jamesallen.com/diamond-education/diamond-cut/

My diamond looks exactly like middle diamond in the top graphic with the “Ideal Cut” caption underneath (at least in proportions), but the graphic below where they describe the different facets of the cut is more what I imagined the perfect diamond would look like (fyi: my diamond has a 58 table and 62 depth). I realize that those 2 pictures are pretty similar but in this picture of one of the rings I like:

https://www.jamesallen.com/engagement-rings/solitaire/18k-white-gold-heavy-contour-solitaire-engagement-ring.html

The diamond definitely looks “deeper” then the rock I have. Anyways I keep waffling back and forth from thinking I’m being crazy and OCD and that the stone is beautiful (i still feel like this diamond was a surprisingly good deal) to thinking that for this kind of loot I should really try for something I’m more completely happy with. You’ve already been unbelievably helpful but I was just hoping you could shine just a little bit more of your professional expertise on this situation of mine. If I’ve used up all my diamond-knowledge tokens, I would totally understand and still be eternally grateful for the help you’ve given me so far:).

Thank you so much for your response. Very reassuring. I don’t think it changes anything but I got the dimensions of my diamond wrong, it appears the table is actually 56, not 58. and looking at the GIA certification that was included in my diamond, I think that it says my depth actually IS 62.8 (see attached scan). And going any higher in depth according to the interactive graphic on that JamesAllen.com page says it would take it from Ideal cut to Premium cut (which I assume is worse because less blue arrows are shooting out of the picture:) ). Anyways, thanks again for all the amazing insight and for talking me off the ledge.