Forever and Ever: the Eternity Band
On the day we were wed, my husband and I promised to love each other, for better or worse, as long as we both shall live. As the months and years have passed, the timeline of our marriage has become more fluid. The number isn’t as important as the feeling. Our love has everyday continued to evolve and deepen (just like my crow’s feet and smile lines, amiright ladies? I choose to think of this as evidence of a life well laughed and loved). Our ten year wedding anniversary is in just ten months. I’ve told my husband that I want an eternity band: rose gold, single prong set. Yes, it’s true, I’m specific. But he needn’t worry; the custom designers at Andre’s Fine Jewelers (Brighton, MI 810-225-1414) will see to it that my specifications are met, and my expectations exceeded.
When I said I wanted an eternity band, the look on his face was slightly perplexed. Did I want a plain gold band? Did I want a diamond ring? What’s an eternity band? What does it all mean?! He’s a brilliant man, but there is a lot of jewelry terminology there. So let’s start at the beginning. An eternity band is a band of gold or platinum that has stones, usually diamonds, set all the way around the ring. If you were to look all around the ring, there wouldn’t be a single expanse of plain gold (it should start making sense now why I want an eternity band). The eternity band is so loved by couples because it represents the eternal nature of their love for each other. Just as the diamonds have no beginning and no end, neither does their love.
While simple bands featuring stones go back to the 1700s, they were not like what we think of today. The stones featured in these bands were generally white topaz or paste gems. Paste gems are created by manufacturing a heavy and transparent flint glass with a foiled back and then hand-cutting it to mimic a cut gemstone. The resulting “gem” is sparkly like a real gemstone, but being glass, lacks the hallmark “fire” and scintillation of a genuine diamond. The modern conception of the eternity band comes from a 1960s DeBeers campaign designed to sell through a stockpile of smaller (0.25 carat and under) diamonds, as the prevailing fashion at the time was a solitaire ring with a larger center stone paired with a plain gold wedding band.
There are diamond bands that are almost eternity bands, in that they are set with diamonds almost all the way around, but there might be a small space (the width of two or three diamonds). It’s important to consider this one thing carefully when deciding between an eternity band or a diamond band with a small bar of gold in it: ring sizing. Most true eternity bands are either channel set or shared-prong set. And since there is no sizing bar (that little strip of gold on the backside of the ring with no stones), the ring is made exactly in your exact size and it cannot be sized. You would need to buy a new ring if yours didn’t fit anymore (like you gained or lost a lot of weight, had a baby, etc).
Imagine a deck of cards that you start to shuffle. You pin down one end of the cards and lift up the other, fanning them down. But, and we’ve all done it, if you are a little too aggressive with your lifting, your cards just spurt out of the deck, flying across the table. Now imagine that that deck of cards is actually an eternity band that has gotten too big. If the jeweler cuts out a thin section of the gold and then pulls the ring ends back together (which is standard practice for ring sizing), the prongs pull apart from the stress and they’re no longer tight enough to hold your diamonds in place. Your diamonds go flying just like your deck of cards. The same thing happens with channel set diamonds. Because the channel cut into the ring is on made on an arc specific to that ring, if you change the size of the ring, the arc is altered. This means your diamonds aren’t as secure as they should be and could fall out. For more on how diamonds are channel or prong set, check out this blog.
Historically, eternity bands were given to the wife on the occasion of the birth of the couple’s first child. But this idea has shifted with the changing landscape of American romance. Now, eternity bands are seen as an ideal gift to commemorate any important occasion in a couple’s life, whether that is a first anniversary, a tenth (take note, my love), or a fiftieth; or the birth of a baby. If a parent passes, the spouse could take some of their jewelry and have it made into an eternity band for their grieving partner.
There are a ton of options when it comes to choosing an eternity band. For the best selection this side of cyberspace, check out Timeless Wedding Bands’ carefully curated collection here
Share This Page:
