If you want to get ahead, wear a Tacori

Getting engaged is something you associate with youth, but with more women in their 40s and 50s on second marriages, second engagements are also increasingly common.

I never got an engagement ring, partly because we got married six weeks after my husband asked me, but also because I'm not used to wearing anything on my hands or wrists. It took me years to get used to even a wedding band. However, my sister, who didn't get an engagement ring either until long after she was married, felt the loss of a rock pretty keenly. Her husband eventually bought her one, after endless chivvying, several years after the wedding. 

Brought up as I was on the dark blue sapphire flanked by two tiny diamonds, the point of an engagement ring escaped me until I saw my first diamond solitaire. Now that's a different kettle of fish. 

There is something about a diamond solitaire that just shouts expense. It's not even so much the size of the carat as the quality of the diamond - my ex-partner's mother had a three-quarter carat stone that caught the light whenever she moved her hands, whereas the one and a quarter carat she wore on the other hand was not such good quality. She was known to twiddle the good one whenever she needed to get her point across - clearly, if you're going for a rock, you should go for a serious rock. It carries clout.

I came across this site the other day, JR Dunn, and they have a bunch of very high-end diamond solitaires by a family firm called Tacori - some of them most unusually set in rose gold, which makes a very pretty mount for a clear stone.  I have never seen diamonds set in rose gold before, though they also have them in the more usual platinum. Yellow gold and rose gold seem to be generally special order, while the platinum comes as standard.

Besides the solitaires, Tacori also offers some lovely three-stone diamond ring designs - my favourite is one called Ritani, but I can't show a picture of it here as the images are copyrighted. It's three diamond solitaires set in circles of smaller diamonds, a bit like the Olympic rings - very modern, very Deco and very striking. It's a tad over $7,000 but that's a ring I could see me wearing a LOT.

All Tacori engagment rings are handcrafted in California.