The run up to Christmas is peak time for engagement ring sales. It might be the mistletoe, or the mulled wine or it might just be that people like to pop the question over new year and then have a wedding to plan in January.

Anyway, if you're considering a proposal at the moment, here are 5 quirky engagement rings you can find on Etsy, which has a good choice of handmade, vintage and unusual rings.

You are perfectly entitled to ignore 'traditions' about spending a month's salary on an engagement ring, since they were created by diamond manufacturers. In reality, many of us don't have £1000 or £2000 spare once we have paid for everything else for Christmas. 

For £200 you won't get a brand new high grade diamond, but you might consider something like this vintage 18 carat gold engagement ring with a 0.15 carat diamond for £190.

Alternatively, go for an alternative gemstone such as this gorgeous emerald and diamond ring for £186.

Studies of how much the average UK proposer spends on an engagement ring seem to vary wildly. Some put the average at around £600, others say it is more like £1500.

If you are working to a budget of around £1000, you've got a pretty huge market to choose from. 

Personally I like a traditional solitaire diamond with white gold, but do some discreet digging through your potential spouse's jewellery box to work out which styles and colours they go for.

How about this 0.45 carat diamond in a platinum setting for less than £900?

If 2016 has been kind to you, or you've got a savings pot to dig into then you can pick up something pretty special for an engagement ring. 

​How about this vintage Tiffany & Co engagement ring for just over £10,000? 

​It's got a 1.21 carat diamond and comes with the Tiffany certificate and presentation box. 

Prepare for the sound of a jaw dropping if you propose with this ring...

There's nothing to say you have to buy a diamond ring at all when you pop the question. It's not easy, but try to suss out your potential spouse's view on diamonds. You might find they actually want something a bit more reflective of their own tastes and personality, such as an alternative gemstone like a ruby, a sapphire or an emerald.

Or how about an uncut diamond, showing off the value of a diamond but a bit of quirky individual style? This 1.40 carat uncut diamond is £700.

You can find more shopping ideas in Etsy's Editor's Picks. We participate in Etsy's affiliate scheme.

So you've blown your entire savings on an engagement ring. The answer was yes, and after initial excitement you're now saving up for the wedding, trying to show an interest in different shades of pink paper for the invitations (secretly hoping that the cheapest one gets chosen because they all look pretty similar). 

Suddenly you realise that you've got to get a ring for yourself as well. 

The good news is that a men's wedding ring generally doesn't cost nearly as much as a diamond engagement ring. Sure, you can spend £1000 on a men's wedding ring if you really want to, but for that price you'd be looking at a huge platinum wedding ring which Mr T would say was a bit showy.

So what you are your options?

If you want to spend a bit of money, your wedding ring options are 9 carat gold, 18 carat gold, platinum and palladium. Platinum and palladium are popular because they stand the test of time very well. If money was no object I'd probably choose one of those two, but in terms of appearance they don't look all that different to the cheaper options.

Expect to pay somewhere between £200 and £1000 for platinum wedding rings (depending on the thickness and your finger size) and about £100 - £500 for palladium.

9 carat gold and 18 carat gold are popular choices. The main downside of gold is that it is softer than some metals, so if you are one of these proper men that has a job which uses their hands then you mend end up damaging or breaking it. My main risk is papercuts and screen fatigue, so it's not an issue for me. 

9 carat gold is cheaper obviously, since it contains less gold (the rest is cheap metals to pad it out). You'll pay £50 - £300 for 9 carat wedding rings and about twice that for 18 carat rings. Again, the price depends on the thickness of the band. I'd avoid 2mm or 3mm as it looks a bit too dainty for most men.

And what about the cheap end? I personally think it's perfectly acceptable to spend next to nothing on a wedding ring. You can get a ring made from materials which last and who are you really trying to impress? 

Cheap options include cobalt, silver, titanium and tungsten.

For those cheaper materials, prices range from £5 up to £100. Cobalt is light and tough, silver scratches and bends easily, titanium is hard and difficult to resize whilst tungsten is very resistant to scratching and is more environmentally friendly than most.

What would I choose? If money's no object I'd choose platinum. For something precious but not too expensive I'd choose 9 carat gold. For a tight budget, I'd choose tungsten. Complaints to the usual address...

If you're looking for places to buy cheap wedding rings, you might like to start with our guide.

There was a newspaper story a few years ago asking if marriage had become something for the middle classes.

One article quoted academics in Virginia as saying "Marriage is becoming a distinctive social institution marking middle-class status."

Honestly, I'm not sure if I agree with that and it's worth noting that there was another article a couple of years later saying that middle classes were 'turning away from marriage'.

Whatever, the truth of those studies, I do think it's true that the cost of getting engaged stops some people from proposing. Raising £1000 just isn't achievable for some people - I know I'd have struggled to find that amount of money when I was in my early 20s when I was earning a pittance and living away from home for the first time.

So, what if you can only afford an engagement ring costing £100? What can you actually get for your money.

The bad news is that you won't be able to afford a high quality, decent sized, brand new diamond ring. Although, I suspect that is stating the obvious somewhat.

However, a budget of £100 does give (at least) four options:

Diamond rings plummet in price once they've been worn by someone else, even if it was only for a few days before things all went wrong...

The depreciation is worse than a sports car, as a percentage of its original cost. 

For example, I've found several diamond rings with a high street value of about £500 which have gone for £100 on eBay.

​If you're patient, you might even find one from a big name jeweller (Ernest Jones, H Samuel etc) which hasn't even been worn.

Etsy is also worth a look for preloved rings.

If you don't fancy a second hand ring, you could just about get an authentic diamond ring for £100.

In reality, the diamond would be tiny. 

We found a diamond ring with a 0.10 carat for £95 on Amazon. Generally I advise people to look for a diamond of at least 0.25 carat, but if your potential spouse likes dainty jewellery then it's an option.

I'd avoid this option if your girlfriend has massive hands...

There are several alternatives to diamonds, which look similar to the real thing (unless you are a master jeweller) but which cost a fraction of the price. 

Diamond Style or Tru Diamonds are good places to start. Tru Diamonds reckon that their £100 simulated diamonds would cost £8500 if they were the real thing.

It's up to you whether you tell your girlfriend that it's not real...

What a shocker eh? 

Lots of people don't choose diamond rings at all. Historically they never did, until a diamond company carried out one of the most successful marketing campaigns in history.

You can get Blue sapphire, Green emerald or Red ruby rings for well under £100.

Good luck, I hope she says yes...

You expect to pay a bit of a markup on wedding and engagement jewellery. I rather think it is widely accepted that it's a market with wider margins that most industries, and there is a fair bit of work to get from the raw materials of gold, other metals and gemstones to the finished article.

However, I did a bit of digging around a while ago and was rather surprised to find quite how much profit some jewellers are piling on to plain gold wedding rings. 

I picked wedding rings since they are much easier to compare like for like than engagement rings. Each diamond is unique and has its own grading, so it would be easy for a jeweller to claim that their diamond was a better quality than one for half the price at the shop next door.

With plain gold rings, it's much harder to claim there is any difference in quality, since it is a natural material which can be melted down and reused. The only slight complication is that 18 carat and 9 carat gold is made up of gold and other materials, but I worked out that the other materials in a typical 18 carat gold wedding ring would be worth about 20p. It's the gold which made up the bulk of the value.

My search involved looking for as many gold rings as possible which also gave a weight in grams. I found several kept that material hidden - it was actually many of the cheaper retailers which were happy to share the information.

At the time of searching, gold was valued at £28 per gram. 

The cheapest jeweller I found was a 'refurbished' gold wedding ring seller on eBay, which was offering a 3.64 gram ring at £149 - the equivalent of £54 per gram, or about twice the raw material market price.

If you wanted a ring which wasn't refurbished, another eBay jeweller was offering a ring at the equivalent of £64 per gram. Amazon wasn't far behind, with gold wedding rings selling for the equivalent of £68 per gram of gold (£189 for a 3.9 gram ring).

Purely Diamonds, which is a well-respected independent online jeweller was a little bit behind, with the price working out as £77 per gram of gold (remember the market price of gold at the time was £28, so that's a markup of about 2.5 times).

A typical high street jeweller was quadrupling the value of the gold, with a per gram price which worked out as £114 (that was Fraser Hart, but others were along the same lines).

Finally, we looked at Cartier, which worked out as £263 per gram of gold. 

That's a markup of 841% by my calculations.

Now, of course you can always argue that buying from Cartier offers a completely different buying experience than buying a refurbished ring from eBay. It does, that is certainly true. No doubt they offer a personal service, all the advice you want, plus the ring is engraved with a fashionable name.

I don't think there's a right or wrong in this, but if you are planning a wedding on a budget and looking for corners to cut, I would certainly consider buying a cheap gold wedding ring - you can save yourself hundreds of pounds on a product which is essentially the same as the luxury version.

A two carat diamond engagement ring would traditionally be the kind of thing you'd read about in the Daily Mail, along with a picture of a footballer's WAG. It's not a subtle approach to an engagement ring and has always been more for those who want to show off their wealth and who prefer the look of a really big diamond.

That's still the case if you want a high quality 2 carat diamond, but is it completely unaffordable if you are happy to settle for a lower quality gemstone?

Our price comparison on 2 carat diamond rings came up with prices ranging from around £1000 up to £25000. So whilst prices are clearly high, it is worth considering that the average person spends somewhere between £500 and £1700 on an engagement ring (depending on which study you believe).

The slight snag is that if you want to get a 2 carat diamond ring for £1000 then you will almost certainly need to buy second hand. That's obviously not for everyone, but bear in mind that diamonds depreciate hugely once they have been worn so you can get yourself and diminish any further depreciation if you ever needed to sell the ring (hopefully you wouldn't, but still...)

When I searched, I found a second hand 2.30 carat diamond ring on eBay which went for £1019. The grading was fairly low (I3 clarity, which is not great, but colour was G which is decent and a setting of 18 carat gold which is also good - see our beginners' guide for more on what this all means). On Etsy, the cheapest second hand ring I could find was nearly £1700. Obviously these deals change all the team and I could probably find a better deal with a bit more patience and perseverance. 

If you want a new 2 carat diamond, the cheapest option was surprisingly not that far away from the cheapest second hand price, with an Amazon Marketplace seller offering a remarkable price of just over £1300. It probably does not need pointing out that it will be a low grade diamond for this price (I3 clarity, J-K colour, 18 carat gold) but it is not significantly different to the cheapest eBay deal.

​The next four cheapest sellers in our study were all USA based jewellers (Overstock and SuperJeweler for example) who all offer 2 carat diamonds in varying qualities for under £5000, even after you've factored in import and excise fees (see the blog for more on importing jewellery from the USA).

If you'd rather purchase from a UK based jeweller then Diamond Heaven is worth a look (cheapest 2 carat ring was £5000), as it has a Birmingham store in case you need to return it.

High Street options are very limited if you want a 2 carat diamond, presumably because they sell so few that it isn't worth stocking such high value items. The only High Street jeweller I could find offering a 2 carat engagement ring was Beaverbrooks, which is perhaps not surprising as they are perhaps the poshest jewellery name in most towns. The downside is that their cheapest 2 carat ring will cost you £25000, although it was a higher grade than most in our study with a clarity of VS2 and a platinum setting which is generally more expensive than 18 carat gold.

I hope she says yes....​

Let's start off by saying that a 1 carat diamond is big. I don't mean choke-a-donkey big, but it is certainly above average for a diamond engagement ring.

​According to this article the average size for a diamond is 0.9 carat, but as we all know, there are several ways of measuring 'averages'. I would say that an independent jeweller who sells a 1 carat ring would consider it a good day. My hunch is that most people buy a diamond ring which is between 0.25 and 0.75 carat, although I don't have the data to back that up yet.

Anyway, if you fancy making an impression with your proposal then a 1 carat diamond is certainly worth considering. When I proposed six years ago, a 1 carat ring was well out of my price range, but things have changed a bit in recent years with many more online jewellers offering very low prices and a busy second hand diamond market.

We compared more than thirty diamonds with a 1 carat grading and found prices ranging from £370 up to £7500. A later study we did looking at expensive diamond rings found many 1 carat rings costing well over £10,000 but for our first price comparison we just looked for the cheapest available on each website, regardless of quality.

The cheapest 1 carat ring of them all was (unsurprisingly) a second hand 1 carat diamond. In this case, it was an eBay seller but no doubt you could find similar deals on other second hand sites. The advantage of eBay is that they offer more buyer protection than some, so if you end up paying £370 for a Haribo ring then you can get your money back.

If we exclude second hand rings, then the cheapest 1 carat diamond ring we found was just over £700 from Overstock. It was a relatively low grade (H-I colour, I1 – I2 clarity, 14 carat white gold) but that's still a very low price for a diamond of that carat. 

The sizeable caveat with that is that Overstock is based in the USA. Whilst that price in included the import duties and taxes, it is worth realising that it will take a bit of time to arrive and even longer if you need to send it back. 

For me, buying from abroad is too much hassle, but it certainly becomes more appealing when you start looking at larger carat diamonds (see this blog on importing diamonds for more on that topic).

So, if you want to buy a 1 carat diamond and you want to avoid a) second hand buyers and b) non-UK based jewellers, which is your cheapest option?

The answer is Amazon, or Amazon Marketplace to be precise which is a third party seller operating through Amazon. We found a 1 carat diamond ring selling for just over £800. It's worth saying though that the clarity was pretty poor (I3) and you will start to notice differences in quality more on a larger carat diamond than you might in a smaller carat diamond.

And what if you'd like to buy from a high street jeweller, either because you want the convenience of easy returns to store, or because you like the prestige of a ring which came from a well known jeweller?

The cheapest in our comparison was F Hinds at £1999. Clarity and colour wasn't specified, so we can assume it is a lower grade diamond, but it was 18 carat gold which is one of the more expensive metals for a diamond setting.

You can see the full 1 carat diamond price comparison here.

I hope she says yes...

I love a good spreadsheet. All those numbers lined up, the potential to create graphs, data upon data upon data. Phwoarrr!

It may have been that unnerving love of numbers which led me to get a little bit obsessive in my search for the UK's cheapest 0.25 carat diamond engagement ring.

So why 0.25 carat?

Well, during my hunt for an engagement ring that I could actually afford without selling my body parts, I decided that 0.25 carat was the smallest size diamond I would be happy buying.

As it happened I bought a ring that was around 0.35 carat and was very happy with it, but I felt that anything above a quarter carat was acceptable. Below that size and you really are squinting to see the diamond and above that size people will start to call it 'delicate' or 'tasteful' rather than 'small' or 'what diamond?'.

I ended up looking at 45 online jewellers and found prices ranging from £55 up to £950. 

Yes, there was certainly a variation in quality but it wasn't necessarily the case that the most expensive ring was the best one. 

The top couple of results were admittedly somewhat invalid as they were second hand rings. There's nothing wrong with buying a second hand diamond (we've covered that topic in this blog before) but I appreciate that a lot of people wouldn't consider it as an option (myself included, if I'm honest).

So, let's exclude eBay (£55) and Etsy (£95) for those reasons. 

Our winner then, on the day, was Amazon which had a 0.25 carat diamond ring with a fairly low grade clarity and colour for £221.

Let's carry on down the list though, because some people will be keen to get a reasonably high grade diamond ring, even if they are searching for a smaller diamond.

Well, the cheapest 0.25 carat ring which I would say was at least in the mid range of grading was from Purely Diamonds and came in at £350. It was an SI2 clarity, H colour diamond, so not mega high grading, but somewhere in the middle at least (if you're looking for the highest grading possible in a 0.25 carat diamond ring then I'd try Aspire Diamonds which offers D colour, IF diamonds for around £1300).

And what if you don't fancy buying from a jeweller which mostly operates online? After all, you may end up taking it back (although let's hope not).

Well, in our comparison, the cheapest 0.25 carat diamond ring from a high street jeweller was £270 from Argos.

And the most expensive? Well, that Aspire Diamonds ring at £1300 was obviously way more expensive but it's not a fair comparison as the quality is so different. 

A more comparable diamond to the one on offer at Amazon at £221 was one for sale at £950 at Beaverbrooks.

But then again, Beaverbrooks offers the prestige of being an established luxury jeweller and the convenience of high street returns. And wouldn't you rather present your diamond ring in a Beaverbrooks box?

I'll leave it up to you to decide what price you put on that.

I’ve taken a break from my usual penny pinching and bargain hunting recently, with a new guide to the best places to buy expensive engagement rings. 

Really, what I mean is the best places to buy very high quality engagement rings but they also tend to be the most expensive rings (and Google prefer the search term ‘expensive engagement rings’ for some reason).

I was curious to know how much the UK’s most expensive engagement ring cost. Or more specifically, the most expensive engagement ring that I could buy online there and then, rather than a diamond locked away in a safe somewhere in London which is owned by a billionaire.

Most of the expensive rings I found were a similar price to a new family car – somewhere between £10,000 and £25,000. The priciest ring on Purely Diamonds was a top quality 1 carat diamond going for £13,000 whilst Aspire Diamonds went up to £11,000, Beaverbrooks went up to £26,000, Shining Diamonds was £12,500 and Goldsmiths top priced engagement ring was £15,000.

A few online jewellers had rings for the cost of a sports car - sites like Diamond Heaven  went up to £49,000 (for a 2.5 carat diamond), and bizarrely CostCo (which I'd normally associated with bulk buys and discounts) had several rings around £40,000 - £50,000 with one for sale at £90,000. 

Amazon had a few rings priced around £100,000 although they were third party sellers rather than actually sold by Amazon.

Finally, I struck gold (or diamond I guess). Steven Stone had a diamond which was nearly 10 carat going for £1,383,437 - ten times the next highest retailer.

There's another twist though. I checked again a few days later and the highest on offer had dropped to £315,349 - a million pounds less than the most expensive ring just a few days earlier.

I like to think someone had bought the £1.3 million pound engagement ring. More likely, it was taken off sale for some other reason, but if you see a Steven Stone salesperson with a very wide smile this week, you'll know why...

I rather suspect that some men are postponing proposing to their girlfriend's because they think they can't afford it. 

Sure, weddings themselves can be pretty pricey once you start inviting all your aunts and second uncles but getting engaged doesn't need to be. Whilst the average spend is pretty high (between £600 and £1700 depending on which survey you believe), it is perfectly possible to get a cheap engagement ring for a similar price or even less than an XBox One.

As I write this, a new XBox One will cost you around £230, so that's the budget I'm going to work to. 

First stop, I'd suggest is Amazon where you can (at the time of writing) pick up a 0.33 carat diamond engagement ring for £199 (the price varies depending on your ring size, but most sizes are within my £230 budget). That's not a huge diamond, but it isn't particularly small either so it will look perfectly respectable for most people.

Of course, size (or rather carat/weight) isn't everything with a diamond ring. The quality - or grading - of the diamond also matters and for a low-end budget you won't get the highest graded rings. My (somewhat controversial) view is that for most people, the differences will not be especially noticeable until you either use a magnifiying glass or you start putting vastly different diamonds alongside each other. 

If you'd rather buy from a jeweller which has high street stores (making returns easier) then take a look at Argos. Their prices do fluctuate with sales and promotions, but I've seen 0.25 carat diamond rings on offer at around £225. 

If you're feeling a bit more adventurous, I'd consider buying from a US jeweller. You'll have to pay customs fees, but the prices at a retailer like SuperJeweler sometimes make it worth the hassle (check out the blog on importing diamonds for more on this).

Finally, I'd look at the second hand market. With an XBox budget you'll be able to get something which originally retailed for around £500 - £1000. It's up to you whether you (or your potential spouse) would be happy to wear preloved jewellery. I'd start by searching for diamond engagement rings under £200 on eBay.

So, if the cost of the ring is putting you off - but you think you can afford an XBox One - then I'm afraid it's no longer a legitimate excuse...

Happy hunting, I hope she says yes.

We've talked before on this website about the myths surrounding how much men spend on engagement rings.

Jewellers would like you think that it is one month's salary or even two months or three month's salary (see this BBC article about the work De Beers did to create that 'tradition'). 

But hang on a minute - it isn't. It's nowhere near.

In the UK, the average salary is around £27,000 at the moment which works out as £2250 for one month, £4500 for two months or £6750 for three months (assuming the 'tradition' is salary before tax id deducted).

But people just don't spend that much money on engagement rings. 

No-one seems quite able to agree on exactly how much proposers are spending, but everyone agrees it isn't that much. Recent surveys for average engagement ring prices came up with the following figures:

• £573 (This Is Money, research by Allianz, 2016)
• £1329 (Marlows, 2012 - this one also concluded that men in Wales spend about £600 compared to £1600 in London)
• £1231 (Daily Mail, research by LV Insurance, 2012)
• £1576 (Men's Health, source unknown, 2007)
• £1772 (You & Your Wedding, 2015)

​
So, from those numbers we can conclude that whilst surveys come up with wildly variable numbers, none of them come close to the £2250 - £6750 range above.

Our view at the Cheap Engagement Rings Guide is that you spend what you can afford, rather than what you think you should spend. Sure, you want to get something decent and you don't want to scrimp too much on something which should last for decades, but you also needn't feel you need to start off married life heavily in debt. 

It's also not really true that you get what you pay for with an engagement ring. Of course, a top quality ring will cost top money, but you will also find two diamond rings of a very similar quality being sold for wildly different prices.

Just take a look at our price comparison charts for 0.25 carat diamonds, 1 carat diamonds and 2 carat diamonds. You need to look carefully at grading (see the guide to 10 things you need to know when shopping for cheap engagement rings for more on that) but the profit margins applied by jewellers vary massively.

So, work out what you can afford and then take a look at one of our guides which cover what you can get on an engagement ring budget of £100, £200, £300, £500 or £1000.

Happy hunting, I hope the answer is yes!