Most of the price comparisons we've done on this site (1 carat, 2 carat etc) have been comparing solitaire diamond engagement rings, simply because it's one of the most popular settings.

Pretty much every jeweller will offer at least one solitaire setting, so it's ideal for doing a fair comparison.

​My general advice is that if you are looking for a 'classic' style of diamond ring and don't want to take any risks then solitaire is likely to do the job. 

However, it's worth noting that there are loads of other options for diamond ring shoppers looking for something a bit different.

Here's an infographic by a US-based jewellers called Casting House which covers the most popular settings and styles:

As a keen car booter I was amused to see the recent story of the £10 diamond which sold for £657,000 at auction.

My finest car boot moments were not quite so lucrative but mostly involved buying Atari, Commodore and vintage Nintendo consoles which at one time were going for a few pounds as people emptied their attics.

The £657,000 diamond was 26 carat - the word whopping doesn't quite go far enough when it is also used to describe a burger. Our guides go as far as 2 carat diamond rings, but a 'normal sized' engagement ring is certainly less than 1 carat (mine was 0.35 carat or thereabout). 

As you've probably gathered, one 26 carat ring is worth a whole lot more than 26 x 1 carat rings. The cheapest new 1 carat ring on our guide is about £1000 (I won't patronise you by doing the maths for you). A decent one is usually much more expensive.

Rather obviously, larger diamonds are rarer than smaller ones and you can't exactly stick two diamonds together or melt them down, as you could with two chunks of gold.

Which brings me to my main point - be very wary of the letters TDW if you see it on a diamond engagement ring which appears to be a bargain. It stands for total diamond weight, which means that they have added together the weight of all the tiny diamonds on a ring to come up with one impressive total. Usually such rings are called cluster diamond rings, but it isn't always made clear. 

A cluster diamond ring with a TDW of 1 carat is worth significantly less than an engagement ring with a single 1 carat diamond.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with cluster diamond engagement rings. In many cases they look rather nice and give a fantastic sparkle. They're also a good budget option which can look worth much more than its price tag.

You'll find big name jewellers will label very clearly but be vary if there's a very limited description or if it's secondhand and hasn't been well photographed.

For advice on buying second hand, see our guide.

I've recently been doing a bit of digging (not literally) for conflict free diamonds.

Like lots of other people I was embarrassingly unaware of the issue until it became the subject of a film in 2006. In my defence, I wasn't looking to get married at the time so I had no real need to buy a diamond (I'm sure I would have looked handsome with a diamond stud in my nose, but it was beyond my means).

11 years after the film, it still appears to be a problem, at least according to Amnesty International who say the industry still helps 'fund devastating civil wars in Africa'. 

​Three years prior to the film coming out was the development of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme which you may well have heard about. 

However, according to Amnesty International (again):

Despite its pledge to support the Kimberley Process and Clean Diamond Trade Act, the Diamond Industry has fallen short of implementing the necessary policies for self-regulation. The retail sector in particular fails to provide sufficient assurance to consumers that the diamonds they sell are conflict-free.

Their plea is to help them survey retailers to find out what is happening on the ground.

My own research was more positive than I was expecting. 

I looked at five of the UK's high street jewellers and found all of them offer a guarantee on their website that they don't sell 'blood diamonds' (I looked at H Samuel, Beaverbrooks, Ernest Jones, Goldsmiths, F Hinds.

I then looked at Amazon, which has a vast choice of diamonds. 

It's important to understand that Amazon sells items direct and it also allows others to sell through its third party 'Marketplace'. Amazon's big diamond brands like Miore or Naava both guarantee to be conflict free, so if you want to be sure I would buy direct from Amazon.

There was an article 10 years ago which suggested that it is harder to offer such guarantees with third party sellers, but that's about all I could find. Most items on Amazon have clear descriptions, and you can always contact the seller if you find a bargain which you aren't sure about.

Other big online diamond sellers which offered conflict free guarantees included Diamonds Factory, Diamond Heaven and Purely Diamonds.

I'm certainly not saying that the issue of blood diamonds has gone away but I was pleased to see how easy it is for UK shoppers to find a diamond engagement ring which is guaranteed to be conflict-free.

There are some corners you can cut when wedding planning without anyone really noticing all that much. For example, you could save yourself a few hundred pounds by choosing 9 carat rather than 18 carat wedding bands. 

However, I personally think that there is a big difference between professional and amateur wedding photographs. Sure, your friend has a camera which looks half decent and they've uploaded a few nice photos to Facebook of their holiday to South America. But many photos did they take before they got one which looked half decent?

The problem with digital photography is that a monkey with a decent SLR camera could produce a few decent photos out of a several hundred bad ones.

At a wedding there are a few moments you need to get right as a photographer or you will miss them. And it's also much more complicated than discreetly hanging around taking natural photos of the sides of people's faces. At most weddings it requires creative ideas, a general willingness to shout at people and an understanding that there is a tight timetable because the parnsip soup starter is getting cold.

So, I'd say you've got three options from wedding photography:

1. Rely on friends taking photos and accept that you will mostly end up with blurry iPhone photos of the back of your head
2. Take a gamble on a hobbyist, who works in Tesco during the week but has a good quality camera and does half a dozen weddings a year. Some of these people are very good, but others are not. You can take a look at their website, but a handful of good photos doesn't mean a lot - see if you can see a whole album from a wedding instead. Of course, they tend to be cheap as it isn't their main income. Expect to pay a few hundred pounds.
3. Cough up for someone who makes their livelihood from wedding photography. Again, try to look at a whole album from a wedding rather than a couple of nice photos on their home page. Expect to pay a thousand pounds or more.

If you go for the third option, there are still ways you can save yourself some money. 

Firstly, take a look at the package on offer from the photographer. Often they include lots of extras which they will cut out if you are on a budget. 

For our wedding, the quoted package included a hefty photo album. I asked for a quote for just a disc of photos and they cut it down to nearly half the price. I then made a photo album myself, which took me hours but was a big saving.

Second, decide which part of the wedding you want to have photographed. The high cost of wedding photography is often because you are asking them to attend from 9am for the bride's makeup, through to midnight when Uncle Ken is throwing up in the car park. 

You may feel that photos of the wedding ceremony are all that you won't done professionally, so ask for a quote just for that. During the busy summer season you might find a busy photographer is reluctant to take a three hour job, but on a quieter day they will do you a reduced rate.

Thirdly, create a shared location for guests to give their photos. Images on Facebook are heavily compressed so they aren't great for printing off, so try to get the higher resolution versions. Most of your friend's photo will be blurry rubbish, but you'll find a few gems.

Good luck!

Check out our guide to the best places to buy cheap engagement rings

I'm not sure how my wife would have reacted if I'd revealed that her engagement ring cost £50. Perhaps in the first few weeks of marriage I'd have got away with it, as long as I hadn't pretended it was much more expensive on a previous occasion.

If I confessed now after many years of marriage, I suspect it would not go down so well.

For the record, my engagement ring did not cost £50 but I'm sure there are those working to such a budget either through principle or necessity.

We recently did a bit of digging around to see if you can buy an engagement ring for the price of a tank of petrol for our new guide to rings under £50.

If you are rigidly stuck to the idea of buying a diamond ring, and you are superstitious enough to believe that you shouldn't buy used jewellery then your options are - to say the least - limited.

I found two rings on Amazon which ticked the right boxes with a couple of caveats. Firstly, the £45 ring contained a diamond which was either 0.04 or 0.05 carat. That's the tiniest of tiny diamonds and around one fifth of the weight that I personally considered when buying my ring (and I wasn't looking at a BIG ring by any means).

Secondly, as is often the case with Amazon jewellery, the price varies depending on which size you buy. This always strikes me as odd, but is presumably due to an algorithm deciding prices rather than a jeweller called Terrence with a magnifying glass and a waistcoat. Only one of four or five sizes available was within the budget with  other sizes costing more like £75. 

Still, you are still getting a diamond ring for less than £50, so it shouldn't be dismissed as an option.

The next option is buying second hand. Used jewellery plummets in price at an alarming rate so you could expect to pay £50 for a ring costing two or three hundred pounds. Prices are at their lowest for unbranded jewellery which lacks certification and decent descriptions. The very cheapest rings I found on eBay didn't even have a guess at the carat of the ring.

If you fancy taking a bit of a guess and a bit of a risk then you can pick up something reasonable looking and in budget.

The final option is to avoid diamonds altogether, which either means buying an alternative gemstone (Blue sapphire, Green emerald or Red ruby) or buying something which looks like a diamond but which costs a lot less. 

Personally, I'd make it very clear from the start that I had bought a faux diamond...but that's completely up to you.

Good luck, I hope they say yes...

Hopefully this website has helped you find a diamond ring which is within your budget, and you've got the answer you were hoping for.

Next up, of course, is the wedding planning, which is - let's be honest - a bit of a stressful time. You don't want to appear to the scrimping, but you are equally well aware that your budget is becoming a fading memory.

You will hopefully find that your friends and relatives who have been through the same situation will be looking to help out via the gift list.

It's worth thinking this one through if you want to maximise the opportunity, rather than ending up with three vacuum cleaners or a set of dinner plates which you never use because they won't go in the dishwasher.

My hunch is that people are increasingly accepting of couples who don't just go for the usual list of things for their houses. By the time many people get married, they may well have a house full of stuff and money towards something big will be more useful.

If you go for a traditional wedding list, then three of the most popular options in the UK are:

• Amazon, which we used for our wedding list. We liked Amazon because we found that prices on offer were very low, and there was a huge range of products on offer. The main issues we found were that prices fluctuate a lot and that if Amazon isn't the cheapest option then it will default to a third party seller (not a big issue, but I prefer buying from Amazon direct). The items also arrive as people order them, rather than in one go, which is fine if you are at home a lot or have helpful neighbours. It can be a bit tricky if you have 100 presents arriving over the space of three months and you are out most of the week.
• John Lewis tends to offer rather classy branded products, although there are some lower priced own branded items too. You can also choose for guests to give donations to charity or buy you a gift card. You can get people to pay towards a honeymoon, but only if you book through a particular agent.
• Debenhams Wedding List offers a £50 giftcard when your guests have spent £250. The range is pretty decent and I would say fairly similar to John Lewis.

If you would rather guests put money towards a honeymoon, you might consider a company such as HoneyFund. Most options are free, although you can upgrade to make the whole thing look a bit swankier and personalised. 

It's also worth saying that you don't necessarily have to save towards a honeymoon. You could just choose a big item (perhaps a car) and ask your guests to put some money towards it.

It's got to be better than ending up with a house full of photo frames you don't want...

I've got to admit, I love stats and graphs. I know some people glaze over at the first sign of an X-axis, but not me. 

I did some digging around a little while ago using Google's rather useful Trends tool, which gives an indication of what people are talking about and how society is changing. It shows things like interest in Justin Bieber or Barack Obama over time, but I think it can also show attitudes towards marriage, love and engagements.

The stats show (from my reading) that British men are becoming increasingly interested in marriage, bucking a global trend of apathy towards proposing.

Here's my working: 

The data shows that British interest in the search term 'engagement rings' on Google doubled over the space of a decade (2004 - 2015). That's a pretty significant increase (and it takes into account general increases in people using the internet in case you are wondering). The all-time peak was at the end of 2015, as people rushed to buy engagement rings for new year proposals. I expect the peak will be beaten in December 2016, though that's just a guess based on previous data.

Secondly, worldwide interest in the same Google search term ('engagement rings') dropped considerably over the same period. I calculated it as being a decline of about a quarter. 

Thirdly, the increase in interest in the UK started around 2009, just at the time of the credit crunch and the financial recession. 

Surely you would think that rising unemployment would coincide with less people getting married and proposing? That was the global trend, but for some reason the UK is different. 

So the big question is why?

Honestly, I've gone around the houses on this one. I remember a training course I once went on with a journalist which was saying how easy it is to use statistics to back up your own beliefs or create your own story. The example given was that there were some new stats coming out about levels of alcohol sales during the global recession.

The journalist admitted that he could link an increase or a decrease to the recession. He could argue that sales went up because everyone was drowning their sorrows, or they went down because no-one had any money to spend on beer. 

The reality is that sales might not actually be linked to the recession and there might be some other reason for sales going up or down.

One conclusion that I've come to is that it might be something to do with British shoppers becoming more frugal. As the recession started, there was a big increase in people searching for 'cheap engagement rings'. Could it be that people were still falling in love, and wanting to commit to marriage, but they could no longer afford to spend £2000 on a diamond ring in the high street and were instead looking to get engaged on a budget of £200 with a ring they bought online?

I'd say that theory is certainly possible, but why would it just be British men that followed that pattern during a global recession?

Honestly, I'm still mulling this one over. If you've got any thoughts, get in touch. In the meantime, if you are one of the increasing number of British men looking for cheap engagement rings, I'll point you towards our guide to retailers!

There's a bit of a clever trick you can do with an Amazon search, where you can just look for heavily reduced jewellery.

Give it a go - this link is set up to search for jewellery reduced between 80% and 99% on Amazon.

​So, is that a route worth considering if you are looking for a cheap engagement ring, or are the original prices massively inflated?

The first thing to do is to narrow down from the 45,000 results which came up when I searched. 

I filtered so it was just showing women's jewellery, and then rings, and then engagement rings. It was still at 1000 results, so I filtered again to those with a diamond gemstone and came up with 98 results.

That's a much more manageable number if we are trying to see if we are getting good value.

I then filtered again to remove anything below £25, as they were clearly synthetic diamonds. 

So what was left?

Some of the listings were clearly wrong. I found a 0.16 carat diamond ring for £416, which is an OK price, but the original retail price was listed as £1.49 million, which I would suggest is a little steep - or more likely a mistake. There were loads of listings like this. 

However, amongst all those slightly absurd prices there were about a dozen rings which were good value. They probably weren't worth the original retail price but they were certainly worth considering.

There was a half carat diamond ring in an 18 carat setting sold by the Natural Diamond Store Outlet, reduced from £3000 to £600. It was a fairly low grade, but you could easily pay that for a 0.25 carat ring.

The other deal which stood out was a 2.38 carat diamond ring for £2700 by Diamond Jewelry United via Amazon. The original price was listed as £14650. Grading was actually pretty decent with an E-F colour and an SI2 clarity. That price would be it high up in our 2 carat price comparison (top 5 certainly and that's comparing it to smaller carat diamonds).

So, it's certainly worth a look if you don't mind doing a bit of filtering and sorting.

Good luck, I hope she says yes...

We're spreading our wings a little bit on The Cheap Engagement Rings Guide to look at other money saving ideas for weddings. 

Wedding dresses compete with diamond rings in terms of baffling choices for the potential bride, with thousands of options and prices ranging from £50 or less, up to several thousand pounds if it's appeared with a designer label on it.

If you're currently sitting in the car and crying into smartphone after seeing the prices in a local wedding dress boutique...fear not, there are cheaper alternatives. 

Firstly, there's the option of either importing a wedding dress from abroad, or buying a much cheaper dress online. It won't surprise you to realise that eBay and Amazon are good starting points, but you do need to be willing to sift through thousands of options and do a bit of research.

My preference is Amazon, as you can filter by user ratings out of 5. Sure, you will probably sift out some good quality dresses, but that's not a big problem when you are starting with 250,000 results for the phrase 'wedding dress' (yes, that a quarter of a million). 

You may end up needing to get some tailoring or adjusting done, but if you've paid £100 for the dress rather than £1000 then you will hopefully have some budget to spare.

The next option is to buy second hand. Again, it's a question of being willing to sift through thousands of dresses to find the best ones. Sold prices on eBay range from £50 to £2000, whilst prices in Oxfam's bridal section ranged from £50 to £850 when I searched.

Finally, there's the option of hiring a dress. You might assume this is a cheaper option that buying second hand, but it generally isn't as the companies do a lot of the legwork for you (cleaning, couriers etc). They also seem to focus on the higher priced dresses, presumably because no-one is going to hire a £100 dress. Expect to pay at least £500 to hire a wedding dress.

Good luck!

If you've not sorted an engagement ring, check out our guide to retailers...