QuestionHello!
I am completely uneducated in the world of jewellery. I am purchasing a ring for my girlfriend as a valentines day gift. I found this one online. Any idea how much I should offer for it?
http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/8428/14285a1oz3.jpg
It says that these are Light blue lab created sapphires in a 10 k White gold setting. Large center stone with 6 smaller stones and 4 small diamonds.
Just wanting a basic estimate on what kind of price seems fair. And I mean basic.
Thanks!
AnswerEveryone has different standards but when I see a piece of jewelry done in 10K gold, I expect everything to be of the lowest quality, from the diamonds to the craftsmanship (it was probably cast) and even to the quality and types of metals used to make the gold alloy.
A quick lesson on gold... pure gold is 24kt, anything less than that you can figure out the percentage of pure gold by dividing by 24... in this case... 10k would be 10/24 or 41.6% gold. Jewelers mix the gold with certain metals to lower the quality (and therefore the cost). Some metals are better than others, but some are definitely not desirable. The jewelers I work with use copper and silver in their yellow gold alloys and silver and paladium in white gold. These are very good metals to work with, but other jewelers use nickel, zinc, and others which can create problems such as skin reactions, poor resistance to scratches and corrosion, or they have the effect of making the metal brittle. This makes prongs more likely to snap off and makes repairs much more difficult or even impossible sometimes.
Moving on the gems... being a gem dealer, I'm very against lab created stones. They're not the same as the real thing and their values are artificial. You're looking at a couple dollars worth of 'sapphires' at cost. As for the diamonds... most people think a "diamond is a diamond... they're pretty much all the same", but this is not the case. Good diamonds are not cheap. Years ago when I first started to hire jewelers to make pieces, I went with cheaper diamonds and regretted it. Upon close inspection with a loupe, I found that they were full of inclusions, had a dingy color, and some were even broken. But if you don't have good diamonds to compare them to, its easy to be impressed simple because they're diamonds... I've come a long way since then and I'm now an advocate of buying quality diamonds...even for accents. I could go on and on about diamonds but, to make a very long story short...I'd expect very low quality diamonds on this piece.
Regarding craftsmanship, cast pieces are very quick and cheap to make, especially in lower wage countries. But the quality is usually much lower because the emphasis is on cheap production of mass quantities.
Having said all that, I realize you may have the issue of a budget or target price of the gift to be concerned with... so you have to buy what you can afford and also what you like.
On value...knowing what I know about jewelry and the actual costs of the labor and materials, I wouldn't buy this ring. If I did, I wouldn't pay more than $100, and even that would be a stretch for me. Sorry to ruin any excitement you might have had over the ring, but I tend to think in terms of quality and this is not a quality ring.
Good luck. Be sure to leave a rating. Thanks.
