Most "proper" jewellers will sell them, but probably not your known-names high street jewellers who in all likelyhood don't even have a choice in what stock to put on their shelves - go to a small independent and you'll find second hand jewellery, my wife buys it by preference due to the rip-off effect of new stock as highlighted by FA.

Your average jeweller retails at 100% mark-up (or at least they did up until a few years ago when I knew a few of them) so any new engagement ring that you buy is only "worth" half of what you pay for it when you walk out of the shop and the stone in it is worth less than that given the price of gold/silver etc today, that fact alone should sober you up pretty quickly.

Second hand jewellery on the other hand is normally trade-in or sell-in stock which the jeweller considers too good to scrap, and they'll generally barter with you to get rid of it - you can't be conned if its hallmarked, you can see if its worn or scratched (it probably wouldn't be sold if it was), and generally you'll get a higher carat rating of gold than you would have been able to afford anyway (9ct stuff usually gets scrapped anyway).

Well worth looking out for.

Don't you think that, giving credit where it's due though, the marketing of diamond rings is as good an example of marketing as there has ever been? I mean, a engagement ring is the basic vehicle, but the overwhelming majority of women would probably be convinced that only a DIAMOND ring counts as a "proper" engagement ring and that the bigger and more expensive the stone, the better. The belief that if it's an engagement ring, it HAS to be diamond has become so de rigueur it's now pretty much engrained in the psyche of Western civilisation, such that purchasing an alternative would usually be viewed as a mixture of cheapskate, inappropriate and even grounds for a divorce!

With the sole exception of religion, I can't readily think of any other marketing ploy remotely near this achievement. What an astonishing piece of brainwashing. Respect, de Beers.

From a girls point of view, I couldn't have cared less how much my engagement ring costs, I like it and it was bought on the spur of the moment while we were in Holland on a Dutch Dash which means more to me than cost. I should add we didn't decide to get married while we were in Holland, we were planning it for a while but hadn't got around to go searching for a ring.

The ring doesn't really matter does it? unless you're a gold digger type and hoping for a big fat gypsy wedding too

But did you choose a diamond ring?

Yes, but only because previous engagement rings (to other people) were not solitaire diamonds and I wanted something different from the past. Anyway I was in Holland which is very well known for its diamonds.

Just reading that back and it sounds like I've been engaged dozens of time Only two pretend engagments and one real one

Absolutely.

The only proviso that I'd add is that a jeweller who will move along with current trends will always be a successful jeweller - see the marketing by the company "Hot Diamonds" for an example.

My father knew two jewellers who were from the old school, they had a small shop on a local high street for forty years but would never sell costume jewellery, it was almost beneath them to sell 9ct, ultimately this led to their demise and one of them ended up working for me as a mechanical service engineer before his retirement and his lasting regret is that he let his partner try and maintain their "standards" for far too long, costume and "party" jewellery was where the money was, not so big a mark-up but a huge turnover, they were looking to retail 14 and 18ct ear-rings for £100 plus whereas 90% of the walk-in trade was looking for a £10 pair.

And the fact is that 99% of the population would be totally unable to tell the difference between a diamond, cubic zirconia or even paste.

If costume jewellery can pass for a million pound item, the only essential difference is that the person owning the real thing - if they can persuade people that it's real - must get a buzz out of others being awestruck by how much money they must have spent.

I was recently speaking to a mother at my son's school who was telling me how she'd bought her four year old daughter some 'genuine diamond' ear rings for Christmas. She went on to say that they were really expensive, so she wouldn't be allowing her daughter to wear them for school because she didn't want to have to replace them if they got lost. You know when you just want to shake someone until they lose consciousness?