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.
There's a lot of content about moissanite online, and most of it tells you the same thing. It's indistinguishable from a diamond.
That's not entirely true.
In some cases moissanite is a good option. We make quite a few moissanite rings, and we'll point you toward it when it's the right call. But it helps to be realistic about what it is. It's a different stone, with its own look and its own trade-offs.
This page lays those out plainly, so you can weigh them up and make the choice yourself.
Moissanite is its own stone, not a type of diamond and not an imitation of one. It occurs naturally inside meteorites, but only in tiny amounts, so every moissanite used in jewellery is created in a lab.
It's also hard-wearing. Moissanite sits just below diamond on the scale jewellers use to measure scratch resistance, which makes it well suited to a ring worn every day. It won't dull or lose its sparkle over time.
The way it handles light is where it differs from a diamond, which is the part worth understanding before you choose it.
When you look into a diamond, there's a depth to it. The light seems to carry on well past the surface, a little like looking into a pool of water. That depth is the thing a moissanite doesn't quite have, and set beside a diamond it can look a little hazy.
Whether you'd ever notice comes down to the shape and the size of the stone. In round brilliants and emerald cuts the two are hard to tell apart, and most people never would. It's the longer shapes — ovals, marquise, anything elongated — where the difference starts to be more noticeable, and it becomes easier to see as the stone gets bigger.
Round moissanite (left) and round diamond (right) look the most similar.
Moissanite's high refractive index looks best in direct light.
Elongated moissanites (left) shapes like tend to look less crisp than diamonds (right).
Round moissanite in natural lighting.
Even then it's subtle. You'd really only pick it with the two stones side by side and know what to look for. But it is there and we want to be transparent about it, because most of what you read online will tell you the two are indistinguishable. They aren't.
To our eye, the diamond is the better-looking stone.
There's one other difference. In direct light a moissanite sparkles more than a diamond, with more colour in the sparkle creating a sort of 'disco ball' effect. Some people love it, some don't. Our own preference is to cut our moissanite to look as close to a diamond as we can, which keeps the disco ball effect as minimal as possible.
That isn't a reason to not consider moissanite. It's a good stone, and it's about as close to a diamond as you'll get without buying one.
It costs a fair bit less, and for plenty of people that difference in look is an easy trade for the difference in price. There are designs where moissanite is the better option, which is what the next section covers.
The way we approach a ring is to get the design right first, then choose the stone and the materials to fit what you're comfortable spending.
If the design and the size you're after work out to be more than you want to spend in a diamond, switching to moissanite is often what brings it back within budget without changing the design itself.
You get the ring you actually wanted, at the size you wanted it, and the saving comes from the stone rather than from compromising the design you loved.
The way we approach a ring is to get the design right first, then choose the stone and the materials to fit what you're comfortable spending.
If the design and the size you're after work out to be more than you want to spend in a diamond, switching to moissanite is often what brings it back within budget without changing the design itself.
You get the ring you actually wanted, at the size you wanted it, and the saving comes from the stone rather than from compromising the design you loved.
With diamonds there's a lot to weigh up. Colour, clarity, the cut, which stone is good value and which isn't.
Moissanite is simpler, because there's really only one standard worth stocking and that's the one we offer.
Every moissanite here is colourless with the highest clarity possible, graded to the equivalent of a D-E-F VVS colourless diamond, so there's no quality tier to choose between and no trade-off to manage.
We cut our moissanite to be as diamond-like as possible. This comes down to two differences from the standard moissanite everyone else offers. One is the faceting pattern, which we change to reduce the amount of colour (called fire) in the sparkle, so it's more diamond-like. The other is the proportions: for elongated stones like ovals, we cut to the longer ratios a diamond is cut to, rather than the fatter ratio that's standard for moissanite.
The photo below shows the default fatter ratio for moissanite on the left and our ratio on the right.
That leaves you two decisions, the size and the shape.
Like a lab diamond, a moissanite can be cut to order. So any shape, size, or ratio you're after can be made, even if it isn't on the website.
In everyday wear, set in a ring and on your finger, most people can't unless they know what to look for.
On an older tester, often yes.
The simple ones work by measuring how a stone conducts heat, and moissanite conducts heat much like a diamond, so it can read as one.
A modern tester also measures electrical conductivity, where the two behave differently, and that separates them straight away. Any expert with current equipment can tell in seconds.
It's quicker and easier to produce, it takes less energy to grow, and it's more straightforward to cut. None of that shows up as a difference in quality. You're paying less because it costs less to make, not because you're getting a lesser stone.
No. We buy our own rough and have it cut to our angles and proportions by independent gemcutters.
The branded moissanite we've seen looks no different from a well-cut unbranded stone. The brand mostly adds cost, or the impression of quality, rather than the thing itself.
There's no independent grading lab for moissanite the way there is for diamonds, so any certificate is only as trustworthy as whoever issued it.
Be wary of stones sold with a "GRA" certificate in particular, it's a made-up grading that gets attached to low-grade stones to look official.
The thing that actually protects you is working with a reputable brand.
Yes, we can do this, though we'd typically only recommend it when you're after a different coloured side stone.
Yes. You can view samples at the Auckland studio, and if you're working with us remotely, we can share videos of the stones.
Is moissanite the right choice for you?
We offer moissanite as a stone option on most designs on our website, and you can click through to see the pricing. If you're unsure about anything, or want to view moissanite in person, please get in touch.