Back in February I started to get a little itch in the back of my brain. One that said proposing to Jennifer in Paris would be absolutely perfect. It was time.

I was driving up Burrard St in Vancouver, and the next thing I was inside Spence Diamonds checking out their open showcases of cubic zirconia designs.

You’ve heard the commercials, I know you have. They’re hard to miss. Everything in them is true. The dude who reads them is annoying as hell, but the experience at Spence is second to none. Now their website needs A LOT of work, it did little to help me choose the ring and price I wanted, but once I was in the store, Michelle was a breeze to deal with.

I told her my budget, told her the style, and she pointed me in the direction where I could find settings I’d like. Then she left me alone. Once I found a style I liked, she took me into an office and gave me a complete education on diamond buying. She showed me 3 different stones under a microscope and went out of her way to really help me understand what I was about to do.

Again we went through my budget and she went into their vault to see what sort of stones were on hand.

Here’s where it gets tricky. Jen’s favourite style of diamond is an Asscher cut, or a square Emerald. Spence doesnt carry that one. So the stone Michelle came back with was a round cut. It was .65 and beautiful. Michelle told me many diamond cutters will sacrifice to get to .7, so to find an ideal cut diamond at this size was a great deal. I put a deposit down and left with a big smile on my face.

But then the second guessing. This was a round diamond. Not what Jen wants. It seemed kind of small as well. I mean it looked huge, but I was really trying to get close to 1c with my limited budget, but I wasn’t going to sacrifice colour or clarity.

Then I started to look online. Sure, I’d thought about going the eBay way, but Jen would hand me the ring right back if she ever thought it was cursed with someone else’s bad luck.

I stumbled upon BlueNile.com when I was looking for information on Asscher cuts.

It has a beautiful and easy interface that takes you through diamond and setting selection. You can go through each and every important factor in the diamond from size, to cut, to colour, clarity and budget. Sliders let you adjust the importance and range of each factor and more or less stones in the inventory show up.

You can compare a cloudy big diamond vs a colourless tiny one. It was great. The most important part of the process was BlueNile carries Asscher cut diamonds. The one Jen wanted. And guess what? For the same price I had put down for the .65 round cut at Spence, I could get a full 1c stone from BlueNile.

I chatted up some of Jen’s friends and scoured the internet forums and Twitter to get as much feedback on BlueNile as I could. It was all golden. I called the 1-800 and dumped questions on the operator, all were answered perfectly. If I got the wrong size, they would adjust it for free, it was fully guaranteed etc etc etc.

I bought the ring with the idea that if it didn’t turn out perfect, I had the Spence stone on the side. But when it arrived via FedEx, it was exactly as promised. Huge. Sparkly. Perfect.

I called Spence to drop the deposit and they were awesome again, no questions asked. I really can’t say anything bad about these guys (other than I got a ring 50% bigger for the same price)

Now while I LOVE the convenience of shopping online, the after service makes it a little tough. Had I bought from Spence, or Tiffanys I could just drop in to the store to get a clean or adjustment, I can’t really plug a USB key into Jen’s ring to get the same service. So fingers crossed nothing like that will be needed. In the meantime, I would HUGELY recommend BlueNile.com for those who trust the internets, and Spence for those who want to go the B&M way.

Hey, now that I’ve blog about Jennifer’s engagement ring, does it become a tax deduction? I mean, I do make a couple hundred dollars a year off the blog – surely that’ enough to offset the few thousand I dropped on the diamond as a legitimate business expense?

Just wondering.

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Tags: aaaawwww, shopping