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Comment by liquidcool | Hacker News Reader

It was that way in the US for a very long time. Sometime in the last couple decades a new trend arose to wear both the engagement ring and a wedding band together. The logic being you spent 4-5 figures on beautiful jewelry, so it's silly to only wear it during the engagement. (Whether it's silly to spend that much in the first place is another argument.) I don't know if they are in fashion currently, but many jewelers began selling engagement rings with a paired wedding band that is designed to match perfectly and be fused with the engagement ring after the wedding.

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> The logic being you spent 4-5 figures on beautiful jewelry

Good lord, people do this? People spend ten thousand dollars on a ring? Fuck. When we got engaged, we shopped together and I bought her a black opal ring. Diamond was never on the menu, so I never even looked at their prices. I knew diamonds were expensive, but I had no idea the extent to which people were getting suckered.

> Good lord, people do this? People spend ten thousand dollars on a ring?

No, of course not - why would you think that? Those 'high priced' rings are like the wax fruit in a greengrocer, or plastic lobsters at the fishmongers - just there for show...!

Back in the real world, people can actually spend hundreds of thousands, even millions, on jewelry.

There was a big ad campaign from the diamond cartel to make everyone believe that 3 months of (gross) salary was the standard amount to pay for an engagement ring. That means if you only make $36K/year, you still shell out $9K for a ring. I don't know how many bought into it, but it likely did raise the average amount paid by anchoring the price so high. "That's crazy! Maybe half that..."

It's pretty much always been the case that a married woman would wear both her engagement and wedding ring? There's even long-standing etiquette about the order in which they should be placed on the finger - engagement first, I believe? It certainly isn't something new since the 1990s.

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