chloeishere
Shiny_Rock
- Joined
- Feb 5, 2011
- Messages
- 189
Hi all! I'm new here. I've been lurking on pricescope, reading tons of threads (especially in colored stones! 
) for a few weeks now, and I wanted to ask your opinion on a sapphire we recently acquired.
So, before sparkly pictures, the backstory:
My boyfriend and I have been together about 4 and a half years. He's a cop, and I'm a grad student, so we don't have a lot of money. We've (well, especially me) been looking at settings and stones for an engagement ring a while now... because I'm kind of picky and unconventional, and had no idea what I wanted. Also, the big difficulty is that it's a very limited budget, about $500 total. Realistically, he could afford to spend more, but we're early in our lives, I'm honestly not much of a fancy jewelry sort of person, and I'd rather he spend his money elsewhere, and just get something that I like that isn't expensive.
Oh, the other problem (related to the setting, not the stone) is that I have a nickel allergy (can't wear conventional white gold), and yellow or rose gold don't suit my complexion. Platinum is out of the budget, so I've been focusing on palladium rings.
So, before I looked on pricescope, I've been looking at stones all around the web, and finding a lot was out of the budget. I had pretty much settled on either sapphire or spinel (due to the colors available, and the durability of the stones, since I intend to wear my ring constantly, other than heavy duty stuff like gardening and dishes).
I was doing an ebay search, and found a stone that just sang to me. It was a light blue green sapphire (like the color of my boyfriends eyes ), round cut, not too big or small, and very, very inexpensive. I showed it to my boyfriend, and he said we should try to get it. We won! And it's been in the mail ever since (it was from the seller thaigemstore, who have had some unhappy customers here, but I didn't know that yet). It took about a month to get here, so it just arrived.
In the intervening month, I found pricescope again (it came up frequently during my searches for stones that would be appropriate for my lifestyle), and started really reading and finding out about colored stones, cut, and seeing a whole lot of eye candy. A few days ago, I thought to do a search on the ebay seller on pricescope, and found the thread with unhappy customers (and the vendor pictures thread as well). I'm actually really glad I didn't find it earlier, as it would have given me a much longer time to fret about it. One of the people here (I can't remember who, sorry!) had a picture of a sapphire in an apparently similar color family as the one I got, and it looked just horrible in person, so I set my hopes pretty low. Especially for the price, I figured the stone probably would not look very good, and I knew almost nothing about a well cut colored stone before I started reading here.
To be honest, it looks much better in person than I had been hoping for, though of course much smaller than the picture. And a little less pretty, but I also haven't seen it in natural light as I got it after dark.
So, I wanted to ask the more experienced eyes at PS if it looks like an okay stone. After seeing so many unbelievably gorgeous stones here, I am wondering if I'm going to end up unhappy with this one, since it's probably not a very good cut. I'm also wondering if it has windowing (or a bow tie, depending on the background) and I'm not sure if it will close up in the setting or not.
It is a 1.09 carat 5.5mm round (4mm deep), unheated and untreated light blue green sapphire. The clarity is described as SI 1 (I can't see any inclusions in this light, but I don't know if I could identify inclusions anyway), and the luster as "very good". You can see the green parts if you look at the back of the stone, but I didn't include any pictures of the back.
It probably doesn't need to be said, but the pictures are pretty terrible. I was hoping to make a collage, but my computer died and I don't have photoshop! I think flash vs. no flash is fairly obvious. This is in incandescent lighting, and the room is not very bright.
(Please see the next post for more photos before judging, I did not realize that you had to do attachments on pricescope and only 4 per post!)
For reference, this is the seller's photo.
So what do you think? Please be (constructively) honest, I really want honest opinions. Do you think there is a window, and if so, will it close in a setting? I have been leaning towards a bezel setting with an open gallery, which I'm not sure is the best for that.
Also, does anyone have recommendations for inexpensive but good jewelry makers for the setting? There is no one locally who works with palladium. I was thinking about DanielM or Heartofwater/Sally on etsy, but both of them only mention working in gold or silver, which don't work well with my nickel allergies/ complexion/ skin. I haven't asked them any questions yet, I wanted to get the stone first. I would be fine with palladium white gold instead, or anything hypoallergenic.
Thank you for reading this total monster thread! I'm a bit of a blabberfingers.
) for a few weeks now, and I wanted to ask your opinion on a sapphire we recently acquired.So, before sparkly pictures, the backstory:
My boyfriend and I have been together about 4 and a half years. He's a cop, and I'm a grad student, so we don't have a lot of money. We've (well, especially me) been looking at settings and stones for an engagement ring a while now... because I'm kind of picky and unconventional, and had no idea what I wanted. Also, the big difficulty is that it's a very limited budget, about $500 total. Realistically, he could afford to spend more, but we're early in our lives, I'm honestly not much of a fancy jewelry sort of person, and I'd rather he spend his money elsewhere, and just get something that I like that isn't expensive.
Oh, the other problem (related to the setting, not the stone) is that I have a nickel allergy (can't wear conventional white gold), and yellow or rose gold don't suit my complexion. Platinum is out of the budget, so I've been focusing on palladium rings.
So, before I looked on pricescope, I've been looking at stones all around the web, and finding a lot was out of the budget. I had pretty much settled on either sapphire or spinel (due to the colors available, and the durability of the stones, since I intend to wear my ring constantly, other than heavy duty stuff like gardening and dishes).
I was doing an ebay search, and found a stone that just sang to me. It was a light blue green sapphire (like the color of my boyfriends eyes
), round cut, not too big or small, and very, very inexpensive. I showed it to my boyfriend, and he said we should try to get it. We won! And it's been in the mail ever since (it was from the seller thaigemstore, who have had some unhappy customers here, but I didn't know that yet). It took about a month to get here, so it just arrived. In the intervening month, I found pricescope again (it came up frequently during my searches for stones that would be appropriate for my lifestyle), and started really reading and finding out about colored stones, cut, and seeing a whole lot of eye candy. A few days ago, I thought to do a search on the ebay seller on pricescope, and found the thread with unhappy customers (and the vendor pictures thread as well). I'm actually really glad I didn't find it earlier, as it would have given me a much longer time to fret about it. One of the people here (I can't remember who, sorry!) had a picture of a sapphire in an apparently similar color family as the one I got, and it looked just horrible in person, so I set my hopes pretty low. Especially for the price, I figured the stone probably would not look very good, and I knew almost nothing about a well cut colored stone before I started reading here.
To be honest, it looks much better in person than I had been hoping for, though of course much smaller than the picture. And a little less pretty, but I also haven't seen it in natural light as I got it after dark.
So, I wanted to ask the more experienced eyes at PS if it looks like an okay stone. After seeing so many unbelievably gorgeous stones here, I am wondering if I'm going to end up unhappy with this one, since it's probably not a very good cut. I'm also wondering if it has windowing (or a bow tie, depending on the background) and I'm not sure if it will close up in the setting or not.
It is a 1.09 carat 5.5mm round (4mm deep), unheated and untreated light blue green sapphire. The clarity is described as SI 1 (I can't see any inclusions in this light, but I don't know if I could identify inclusions anyway), and the luster as "very good". You can see the green parts if you look at the back of the stone, but I didn't include any pictures of the back.
It probably doesn't need to be said, but the pictures are pretty terrible. I was hoping to make a collage, but my computer died and I don't have photoshop! I think flash vs. no flash is fairly obvious. This is in incandescent lighting, and the room is not very bright.
(Please see the next post for more photos before judging, I did not realize that you had to do attachments on pricescope and only 4 per post!)
For reference, this is the seller's photo.
So what do you think? Please be (constructively) honest, I really want honest opinions. Do you think there is a window, and if so, will it close in a setting? I have been leaning towards a bezel setting with an open gallery, which I'm not sure is the best for that.
Also, does anyone have recommendations for inexpensive but good jewelry makers for the setting? There is no one locally who works with palladium. I was thinking about DanielM or Heartofwater/Sally on etsy, but both of them only mention working in gold or silver, which don't work well with my nickel allergies/ complexion/ skin. I haven't asked them any questions yet, I wanted to get the stone first. I would be fine with palladium white gold instead, or anything hypoallergenic.
Thank you for reading this total monster thread! I'm a bit of a blabberfingers.
) and many many times they're unheated.
You are all amazing, and I really appreciate the help I've gotten already! I was going to post a longer reply yesterday, but I was spending time with my boyfriend (I don't consider him my fiance until we actually have a ring and he really proposes), and then went to bed.
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