HVVS
Brilliant_Rock
- Joined
- Sep 30, 2009
- Messages
- 816
This is what my husband keeps saying too We are both professionals and will undoubtedly make more as the years go by.
Be careful about assuming that. You're looking at historical data, and the new economic reality is that China and India and Pakistan and other places are growing, and USA is losing it's #1 status. Medicine is becoming socialized. Teachers are being laid off. and public schools are being closed and consolidated. Colleges will wither if nobody has money to pay, and many have already seen up to 1/3 less enrollment for Fall 2010. Not to mention that if your employer merges or goes bankrupt, your jobs, whatever they are, may disappear completely. Heck, the building you worked in for 20 years may even be razed after a merger or buyout, to save paying taxes on it. There has been CONSTANT downward pressure on wages since 2001. In this last depression that USA gov't still persists on calling recession, the people who lost jobs and got new ones are TYPICALLY having to take a 25% pay cut. The reality is, lots of people are downwardly mobile but just don't know it yet.
The more photos I see on PS, the more I've come to believe that a plain, traditional solitaire is not that flattering on most women's hands. It's tough to get the right balance between stone size and shape, width of the band, length-width of the finger, etc. For me, wearing a solitaire just intensified DSS. I mean, they are a classic option, and you can't really go wrong with them, but for me, unless you're a hand model, they look sort of meh. But consider the source -- I wear a large halo!
A superbly cut solitaire can hold its own, I think. I love halos, thorough. With solitaires, I think many people choose the wrong mounting. They make their center diamond look smaller, not larger, by overpowering it with a huge heavy or wide shank mounting or otherwise distracting shank that says "look at me, not the diamond." There's a way to make a big bulky shank work, say the (men's) tension (compression) settings where the diameter of the stone is well matched to the width of the band. But for women's solitaires, putting too much heavy metal prong around the diamond is bad. In fact, I have never liked a setting like the trellis or the X prong. Sorry, but was hate at first site, lol. They are really totally unappealing to me. I prefer a knife edge Tiffany type 6 prong. A 2mm tapered knife edge shank and the right 6 prong head will flatter most diamonds.
Knox Diamonds is apparently no longer on this board. But they have some of the most appealing solitaire mountings that I have ever seen.