All rings can be customised with engravings, birthstones, hidden halos and more.
All rings can be customised with engravings, birthstones, hidden halos and more.
All rings can be customised with engravings, birthstones, hidden halos and more.
All rings can be customised with engravings, birthstones, hidden halos and more.
Refined over 4,000+ designs, learn how our bespoke process works.
Customise, modify or recreate a design, learn how it works.
Picking the right materials is easier than you think. Read our uncomplicated guide to metals and stones.
What goes into the price, so you can choose what's worth paying for.
Diamonds have the 4Cs but theres no equivalent thing for coloured gemstones. For coloured stones, the important thing is colour not the specs and colour is a personal choice.
So this guide is shorter than the others, and it's built around two ideas. The first is that colour is the main decision to make. The second is if you want a lab or natural stone.
If you want a lab-grown stone, it's straightforward. There's a full range on the site, including sapphires, rubies, spinels, emeralds and garnets, in consistent, reliable colours.
You can browse them, see the price, and they can be cut to any shape or size you want. For a lot of people it's the better choice, not the cheaper one. You get exactly the colour you're after, clean and clear, for a fraction of the cost of natural.
Natural stones are harder to source and take more effort because thesupply chain isn't standardised the way it is for diamonds.
Colour varies stone to stone, cutting varies, and the best stones often aren't listed anywhere public because the best stones are negotiated with handshake deals.
Sometimes there's a real chance that a natural stone you find online isn't even available anymore. With some emerald colours, for instance, a mine works through a particular shade and as they dig deeper the colour shifts, so that exact stone simply can't be sourced again. Each natural stone is, to some degree, one of one.
None of that is a problem. In fact it's what makes natural gemstones so captivating. It's just how they work, and it's why this why working with our team gets you a better result than browsing. More on that further down.
It's tempting to start by deciding "I want a sapphire" or "I want an emerald." A more useful starting point is the colour you actually want, because colour is what you'll see and respond to every day, and because the same colour can often come from more than one stone.
Colour comes down to two things:
Two blue sapphires can share the same hue but look quite different. One soft and pale, the other deep and intense.
As a rule of thumb, the colours that tend to look best aren't too light, where the colour barely shows, and aren't so dark that the stone stops catching light and looks flat.
Somewhere in between is where a stone tends to glow. But that's a starting point, not a rule. Plenty of people want a pale, icy sapphire or a deep, inky one on purpose. It's all down to personal preference.
The thing to keep in mind is how much variation there is in a single colour word. "Blue" covers everything from a pale sky blue to a deep midnight, with teals and greenish blues in between. "Green" might lean cool and minty or warm with a yellow undertone. So when you're browsing, or when you see a stone you like somewhere, it helps to look closely at the actual colour rather than the name of it. Two stones described the same way can look quite different in person.
Unlike diamonds, where lab and natural stones look identical, there are some colours and gemstones that are only possible naturally, not in lab.
That said, a high-quality lab sapphire and a high-quality natural sapphire of the same blue will look the same set in a ring. You wouldn't be able to pick which is which.
Lab-grown stones come in a set of colours that are produced consistently and reliably and the quality is excellent. But it's a narrower range of colours.
Natural stones have a wider spectrum of colours. Subtle undertones, shifts within a single stone, two-tone and parti colours where blue runs into green, and specific colours that lab can't reliably produce yet, like teal sapphires and certain greens. There's more of a spectrum in nature than there is in a lab.
So the choice isn't really about which looks better. If the colour you want is available in lab, lab is the easier, more cost-effective way to get exactly that.
If you're drawn to something that isn't avaliable in natural, a colour with more complexity, or one that only occurs naturally, then natural is the path, with everything that comes with it. The variability, the sourcing complexity, the inconsistent cuts, and the one-of-one nature of each stone covered above.
Bespoke signet style ring with a blue lab sapphire.
Green-blue 'parti' sapphire — only possible in natural gemstones.
So the choice isn't really about which looks better. If the colour you want is one lab does well, lab is the simpler, more cost-effective way to get exactly that.
If you're drawn to something outside that range, a colour with more complexity, or one that only occurs naturally, then natural is the path, with everything that comes with it. The variability, the sourcing complexity, the inconsistent cuts, and the one-of-one nature of each stone covered above. And for plenty of people, the colour they want is one lab does beautifully.
Different gemstones have different atomic structures, which means they wear differently. For a ring, this matters more than for any other piece of jewellery, so it's worth understanding.
The usual measure is the Mohs scale, which ranks minerals by how well they resist scratching. The rough threshold for a stone you'll wear comfortably every day is around 7.5 or above. The reason is quartz, which sits at 7 on the scale and is a big part of what dust is made of. A stone that isn't harder than quartz will, over the years, get gradually scuffed and dulled by nothing more dramatic than the dust in the air.
Sapphire and ruby are both corundum, sitting at 9, second only to diamond, and comfortably hard enough to wear for a lifetime without much thought. For coloured stones in an everyday ring, they're the easiest choices.
Green lab sapphire in a simple solitaire setting.
Purple lab sapphire in a gold reverse taper solitaire setting.
On hardness alone an emerald is fine. It sits around 7.5 to 8, above the threshold. But hardness isn't the whole story.
Natural emeralds are almost always heavily included, with tiny fissures running through the stone. Those inclusions are part of what gives an emerald its character, but they're also weak points, and they make the stone more likely to chip or crack from a knock.
So an emerald isn't off the table for a ring. Plenty of people wear them, but requires a bit more care and a protective setting.
Lab-grown emeralds are slightly different. Grown without the fissures a natural emerald has (although you can request them to have the fissures to make them look more natural), they don't have the same internal weak points, so a clean lab emerald holds up far better to daily wear.
Durability is really hardness and internal structure working together, and a lab emerald has both.
One last thing worth keeping in mind. All of this is about rings, because a ring is worn on your hand and takes knocks all day. The same stone that needs care in a ring is totally fine in a pair of earrings or a pendant, where it's barely touched.
Natural emeralds usually have visible inclusions which give the stone character.
Lab emeralds don't have as many fissures or inclusions.
With diamonds, the supply chain is standardised. Stones are graded the same way everywhere, listed on shared databases, and priced consistently, so browsing online works well. You can compare like for like and trust what you're seeing.
Natural coloured gemstones don't work that way. There's no universal grading system, supply is fragmented across a lot of small dealers, and the best stones move through relationships rather than listings.
A dealer with an exceptional natural sapphire often won't put it on a website at all. It gets offered directly to the buyers they work with. So the stones you can find online are rarely the best of what's available, they're just the part that happens to be listed.
This is where we recommend reaching out and working with us to source a natural gemstone, and why we don't just have a list of natural stones on the website. Tell us the colour, the size, and the budget you're working with, and we'll go out to our network and source options to match, including stones you might not have found yourself.
None of this applies to the lab gemstones. That's on the website and directly purchasable. This is purely about natural stones.
Lab stones are priced on the site, the same way diamonds are, so you can see the cost as you choose. Natural stones can't work like that, for the same reason the best ones aren't listed — there's nothing standard to price against.
A natural stone's price depends on its colour, its clarity, its cut, its size, where it came from, and sometimes the specific mine it came out of. Two sapphires that look similar at a glance can be quite different in price, once you account for all of that.
There's no fixed rate, which is exactly why it's worth telling us your budget early so we can find the right stones to match.
None of these change the main decision, but they're useful to have in the back of your mind.
As with diamonds, the thing worth caring about is whether a stone is eye-clean. No inclusions visible to the naked eye. Going beyond that isn't worth paying for in a coloured gemstone.
Lab stones are clean by default. Most natural stones can be found eye-clean too, except for emeralds where inclusions make up the appeal of the stone.
Natural stones are usually cut to preserve weight rather than to hit ideal proportions, which can introduce a few issues worth knowing the names of. Windowing (a see-through patch where you can look straight through the stone), uneven symmetry, and an uneven girdle that can make a stone harder to set securely.
Sometimes these are all unavoidable. But when we select stones we try to choose where these a minimal as possible.
Carat is a measure of weight, and for coloured stones it's a poor guide to size. Different gemstones have different densities, so a one-carat sapphire, a one-carat diamond and a one-carat emerald aren't the same size on the hand. Natural stones are also often cut deep to hold colour, which adds weight without adding visible size.
So rather than quoting carat, stones are described by their face-up size in millimetres, or by diamond equivalent weight (DEW), the carat weight a diamond would be at that same size.
Most are, and no, it isn't a problem. The vast majority of coloured stones are heat-treated to bring out their colour. It's been done for a long time, it's stable and permanent, and it doesn't weaken the stone or cause issues down the track.
An unheated stone of exceptional natural colour is rarer and priced higher, but for most people a heated stone is exactly what they're picturing when they imagine the colour they want. Whatever a stone has had done to it, we'll tell you.
Almost certainly, yes. The lab range on the website is just the part that's straightforward to list.
Beyond that, we can source most things: sapphires, rubies, emeralds, spinels, garnets, and plenty of less common stones besides. If there's a particular stone or colour you have in mind, get in touch and we'll tell you what's possible.
Yes. If origin matters to you, Australian or Canadian sapphires for instance, let us know and we'll source to it. Origin is one of the things that affects a natural stone's colour, character, and price, so it's a perfectly good place to start the brief from. Tell us where you'd like it from and we'll go looking.
We can absolutely work with them, with one thing to keep in mind. Softer stones like pearl and opal sit well below the durability threshold for a ring you'll wear every day, so they're likely to scuff or chip over time on the hand.
They're a lovely choice for earrings, a pendant, or a piece that doesn't take daily knocks. If you have your heart set on one for a ring, we'll talk you through how to protect it and what to expect
Yes, and for a natural stone this is the norm. You'll see the actual stone going into your design, shown with its real colour, in proper lighting, and you approve it before anything is made.
Colour is too personal and too hard to judge from a screen to leave to chance, so there's no guesswork about whether the stone you pictured is the stone you get.
Often, yes. We can work with an heirloom stone, or one you've sourced yourself, within some practical limits around its condition and how it's cut.
There's an additional cost involved, because it's a single stone handled outside our usual sourcing, but if you've got a stone you'd like to use, bring it in and we'll tell you what's possible.
Moissanite is a different stone, not a type of diamond, and it behaves and looks different in person. It's covered in full in the moissanite guide, including an honest take on when it's worth considering as an alternative.
Yes. A lab diamond is chemically and physically a diamond, so it tests as one on a standard diamond tester. The only way to distinguish a lab stone from a natural one is with specialist equipment.
Yes to both. If you have an heirloom stone you'd like to use, the team can work with it, within certain parameters. Our FAQ page has more detail on this.
If you've sourced a stone yourself, that can be worked with too. In both cases there's an additional cost, because the stone hasn't been sourced through us, and sourcing is normally built into the price.
It's worth knowing that more often than not, having us source the stone works out simpler and better value. If you're set on using your own, get in touch and the team will talk you through it.
For most stones, the listing includes a magnified video.
For coloured diamonds, or if you want a closer look at a particular stone, get in touch, and with a deposit the team can usually arrange a natural-light tweezer video.
Talking to us will give you more clarity than endless hours of research.