Blog Inter-Continental Jewelers Houston

 Engagement rings are a centuries-old tradition but their exact type, role, and meaning in the engagement process, as well as their prices, have all varied over time. Fortunately, engagement rings today are incredibly diverse, and an increasing number of people are focusing on more affordable options such as non-diamond gemstones, lab-grown, diamonds, and others. Still, the question remains – what should be the budget for an engagement ring? What are the average prices for engagement rings today? Are you expected to spruce a 5-digit sum of money for a huge diamond? Would you be looked down at for a more modest engagement ring? And how can you get the most bang for your buck when shopping? We’ll try to cover all that below. What is the average budget people set for engagement rings? The exact estimates for an average engagement ring budget today vary depending on who you ask but most agree the average is somewhere around $6,000 for the US. Even then, some estimate that the current a...

Blood diamonds and conflict-free diamonds are terms you’ll often see when looking for a diamond jewelry piece. There are even movies about them, as the topic has been widely discussed over the last couple of decades. Yet there is still quite a bit of mystery, misunderstanding, and even controversy around blood diamonds. So, let’s go over blood diamonds and conflict-free diamonds, and how they impact the jewelry industry. What are blood diamonds? Blood diamond is a term referring to all diamonds for which you can say any of the following: 1. They have been mined in war-torn areas. 2. Slave labor or forced and inhumanely treated and underpaid labor has been used for their mining. 3. The profits made by the selling of these diamonds are used for funding war efforts or terrorist organizations. All of these are things have been true about large parts of the diamond mining industry for centuries, and activists have been speaking against them for the better part of the 20th century. All t...