Jewelry Stores

Hi! That’s really a great question. You won’t find many stores that offer 1 carat diamonds for less than $3000, and you will have to go for a lower clarity and color. But this if perfectly FINE. What you want to do is go for a stone that is still perfect to the naked eye, which you can do with an SI2 clarity and as low as an H color. No one without a jeweler’s loupe will ever know the difference, and you don’t have people looking at your engagement ring with a loupe too often. But they will notice the carat, that’s for sure. Just don’t go below SI2 and H color. Here’s a link to a diamond that fits your budget to those specifications.

Platinum definitely is more expensive than gold. The question as to whether it’s worth the price increase depends on what you’re looking for. If you like the idea of purity, you can’t get that with gold, because pure gold will bend very easily and jewelry can’t be made out of it. So they have to add harder metals to the setting, and 18K gold is only 75% gold. Platinum is  also 30 times more rare and 4x more durable on the Mohs hardness scale. The most obvious advantage is that it needs no maintenance and doesn’t need any rhodium plating like gold does after years of wear. If you don’t need a more durable ring, stick with the classic gold.
 
Here’s a link to a platinum engagement ring versus a gold engagement ring with a price difference of $650.
 
Any more questions will gladly be answered here. Just leave a comment!