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. 

I must confess to a sudden urge to grab this bracelet and put it in my mouth when I saw it - it's just like a sweetie. Sadly, the $800-odd pricetag is out of my range at present, but if I ever get the money together, this bangle might be right up my street.

I have a fondness for multicoloured jewelry, perhaps because it goes with everything. My Gucci watch has one of those interchangeable bezels, so I can switch it from blue to green to whatever colour I fancy that day. Similarly, my favourite necklace has semi-precious charms in a multitude of colours. Only a pity, then, that it weighs so much that it gives me a headache.

This 4.5-carat gemstone bracelet happens to have one other trick up its sleeve - it's real - all the stones are sapphires, which would be a nice little trick of reverse snobbery, Chanel-style.

Having logged onto the company website, Apples of Gold, to see what else they have on offer I find a great deal of personalised gold jewelry (nametags, etc) that isn't my cup of tea, but they do a very nice line in rose gold jewelry, which personally I vastly prefer to 'gold' gold. The higher the carat of gold, the softer the colour and although rose gold is quite low carat, it retains that warm look you see in really high-carat gold.

Gold jewelry

In its gold jewelry
Apples of Gold also does very nice wedding rings - well, nice in that they remind me of my own, which looks rather like a cross between this filigree one at $275 and this Celtic design one at $625. I like this kind of thick, chunky, statement wedding ring, especially because it's the only ring I wear, not having an engagement ring. When you only wear one ring, you want it to count, especially when it's signficant jewelry that has some emotional meaning for you.

Like multicoloured gemstone jewelry, two- or even three-tone gold jewelry also has the handy property of saving you having to mix and match – or from doing what one friend of mine did:  she actually had two separate wedding rings made - one for when she was wearing gold earrings and one for when she was wearing silver. Having a multicolour piece saves you that kind of bother.