About RingBureau

About a year before my partner proposed, I became unreasonably fixated on engagement rings.

I started with the Kay Jewelers on the main strip. Watched the salesperson dim the overhead lights when I held up the loupe (classic). Compared that experience to the lab-grown online specialist I'd been emailing, and eventually drove across Charleston to a local jeweler my coworker had mentioned. Three different experiences, three very different pitches, one running spreadsheet my partner has described as "genuinely alarming" for something he was supposed to be deciding himself.

By the time we got engaged, I had opinions. Too many opinions. The kind that get you roped into friends' ring shopping trips as the person who reads the return policy aloud and asks why the jeweler suddenly needs to "check on something in the back."

That's what this site is. Notes I was already taking, turned into somewhere useful for the next person who needs to walk into a showroom knowing what the sales script sounds like before it starts.

I'm not a gemologist. Not a jeweler. Nothing certified. A marketing manager in Charleston who went down this rabbit hole and came out knowing more than is socially useful about GIA reports, lab-grown versus mined markups, and which mall chains have the worst return-policy fine print.

The jewelry links on this site are affiliate links. Click through and buy, I earn a commission at no extra cost to you. That doesn't change which stores I'd actually point a friend toward. Doesn't-change-anything recommendations are boring to write about, and they would be boring to read.

Who runs the site: full bio here.