Originally posted by: ElFenix
never pay retail on a diamond. never buy from a mall shop. sometimes the dept store are good when they have half off sales.
Ding ding. We have a winner.
I looked long and hard for an engagement ring, wedding ring, and diamond earings for my wife (3 different occasions). I must have spent weeks on each. Anything diamond in a mall will cost you double or triple what you can get at a diamond wholesaler (even after their non-stop 25%-75% off sales). I finally came to the conclusion that jewelery store owners are as shady or shadier than used car salesmen.
1) I had this one guy try to encourage me that a woman would rather have a miscolored diamond than a clear diamond - and no he wasn't talking about the rare and expensive colored ones - but a puke looking off-white diamond.
2) I had one saleswoman take the engagement ring off my wife's finger and run off to the back without permission - we had to chase her down to make sure we got the same ring/diamond back.
3) I caught so many people blatantly lieing about the quality of thier store's diamonds. For example I'd look at a diamond and see a huge black carbon spot spoiling the look and they claim I was imagining it. So I look under the microscope and yep this ugly thing is still there staring at me. If I could see it 3 feet away with my terrible vision and without a microscope, no woman would want it. Same goes with clerks telling me that I was imagining the off-white color, or milky look instead of clear.
I eventually found 2 stores in my city (250,000 people - so it has many dozens of jewelery stores) that were honest about their products. One was a more upscale fancy store (Sartor-Hamon) but was a bit more expensive than I wanted to pay. The other was a diamond wholesaler (Nebraska Diamond) which had any imaginible combination of gem and mounting. Plus its prices were DRAMATICALLY less than the shady lieing mall-type places for the exact same thing.
Best advice - go to a handful of places. Tell them exactly what you are looking for: price, diamond cut, diamond size, diamond quality, etc. See what they have that matches. Then grab the cheapest one that had the features you wanted - I'd really focus on quality to make sure it isn't milky white or filled with ugly imperfections that are obvious to the eye. No reason to go ultra-high in quality. There are several grades - visible flaws to the naked eye, visible flaws to a microscope, and no visible flaws to a microscope. Each of those categories is subdivided, just get a diamond that fits in the middle range. No one will ever know if it is perfect or has flaws only a microscope can see. But be sure you cannot see them with your naked eye - and don't listen to clerks that tell you that you are lieing about seeing the flaws.
