3 Essential Tips for Matching Your Wedding and Engagement Rings
How do you match your wedding ring to your engagement ring?
Congratulations on your upcoming nuptials! It's time to get those wedding bands in order and all tuned up.
Wedding bands can often be bought alongside engagement rings as a pair. If that's the case, or if that ship has sailed, our experts at Michael Gabriels wanted to give some important tips for how to match your engagement and wedding rings.
Before we get into the specific items of note, here are a few things to consider beforehand.
What’s your budget? Normally wedding rings are less expensive than engagement rings, but not necessarily. Are you willing to spend more? Some designs, such as eternity rings may have more carats of diamonds than an engagement ring, and can be more costly. On the other hand, a simple gold band will likely be less expensive than an engagement ring with a diamond center stone.
Will your partner also be wearing a ring? If so, do they need to match? A number of the same stylistic tips we lay out below will definitely apply, though we will be covering this subject more in another blog.
For just matching your engagement and wedding rings, we thought the following 3 tips would be helpful.
3 Tips for Matching your wedding and engagement rings
1. Be Thoughtful and Open Minded
Thankfully, as problems go, matching your wedding ring to your engagement ring is something of a nice one. But it is wise to take some real time to think it out. Sometimes that perfect engagement ring is a split second decision. Maybe it just jumped out at you from behind the glass of a store window, or you had no or little hand in finding or designing it.
Now you are engaged in a determined effort to make it look just as wonderful, but no longer alone. Give it some real thought, and be open minded in your pursuit. You might be surprised, so try out many different options.
When you do so, keep in mind a few of the following tips:
2. Matching the Style:
Try matching at least one aspect of the band of your engagement ring with your wedding ring(s). Below we’ll discuss a number of different ways you can do this to create the perfect pairing.
The easiest way to do this, for a neat and synchronized look, is to match the metals or the width of the bands of each ring. Match a thin band with a thin band, a thick band with a thick band, platinum with platinum, yellow gold with… you get the idea.
Matching the metals is not just a stylistic recommendation, but can also affect wear on the ring later on. We will discuss this further down in the article.
Another way is to match the styles of each band. So if you have a knife cut band on your engagement ring, go for a knife cut on your wedding ring.
If you have detailing on your engagement ring, consider matching your wedding ring with the same detailing. This can work especially well with particular floral and leaf arrangements, and you can mix and match and play around with metal tones for a contrasting, complimentary look.
You can also match the stones. One especially nice trick is to make your wedding ring an infinity ring that matches the halo around your engagement ring’s center stone.
3. Stack Don’t Scratch!
One major concern when stacking rings is whether one will wear on the other. This is especially true for rings of differing metal hardness, or whether there are exposed stones that may hit against the stones or metal of the other band.
That’s one reason why matching metals is one of the first and foremost recommendations jewelers will propose. By having the same metals, or metals of equal hardness, they won’t scratch each other. It’s very practical.
Metals on the Mohs Scale of Hardness (offered at Michael Gabriels)
Yellow gold: 2.5 – 3
Rose Gold and White gold: 2.8 – 4
Platinum: 4 - 4.5
Diamonds are the hardest materials on earth- at 10 on the Mohs scale. Only another diamond can scratch another diamond. So woe may betide one who’s ring stacking has diamonds up against each other.
When you are stacking two rings with diamonds on them, or even moreso, diamonds and other gems or jewels, they can rub against each other and nick, scratch and even fracture. All the more so for the much softer metals that hold them.
It’s important to keep this in mind when designing your ring. Work with your jeweler to make sure that the metals and gems don’t strike against each other in a potentially damaging way.
How much should you pay for an engagement ring?
You can generally estimate a much lower budget for your wedding ring than for your engagement ring. In the US, the average wedding ring is less than half what was paid for the engagement ring.
Of course, there are exceptions, especially with certain designs, and you may choose to spend even more on a wedding ring than an engagement ring.
At Michael Gabriels
If you are interested in producing a customized wedding ring to match with your engagement ring, we at Michael Gabriels will be happy to help you.
At Michael Gabriels, we have been producing custom diamond jewelry for 4 generations. Today, in our family-run small business, 3 generations work in the office with more than a century’s worth of experience to offer each customer. We can help you design that perfect piece of jewelry you will love for a lifetime. Our expert craftsmen are some of the greatest artisans in New York.
Today we work almost exclusively with lab-grown diamonds. We prefer them because they are more environmentally friendly, and have fewer social justice issues associated with them. You might prefer them because they are real diamonds that are much less expensive than their mined counterparts.
Please don’t hesitate to contact us online, or via Instagram, and we will be happy to answer any questions you may have, or to design and produce that perfect piece of lab-grown diamond jewelry.