You don’t have to feel guilty about wanting to reset your engagement ring. Your style has changed. Your financial situation has changed for the better. Your ring is looking worn or, worse, damaged. You want to celebrate a major milestone in your relationship. Maybe you never loved it in the first place but loved the giver too much to say anything. Maybe it was an heirloom and you didn’t want to rock the family boat at the time. Or maybe you’ve moved on from the relationship in which you received the ring and now you want to make it uniquely yours, a symbol of your personal change and growth.

Whatever your reason for wanting to reset your rock, you don’t have to feel guilty about it. It’s not an insult to the giver. And you should be rocking the rock you want, and deserve.

We are here to help you do just that. We’ll guide you through the thought and decision-making processes (both emotional and physical) you’ll encounter on the road to remounting or resetting your engagement ring.

Everything you need to know about resetting your engagement ring

1. The Emotional Aspect

Yes, you absolutely don’t need to feel guilty about wanting to reset your engagement ring and rock your rock. But you do need to be thoughtful about it and show some sensitivity to the history of your ring:

  • Are you still with your partner who gave you the ring?
  • Was it a family heirloom? (Whether yours or your partner’s.)

If you answered yes to either of the above questions there are conversations that need to be had before you move ahead.

Speak to your partner
We’re going to be honest here: your significant other who gave you the ring may feel hurt and confused when you first broach the subject of resetting your engagement ring. At first. More often than not they have put hours of time, effort, and thought, along with painstaking budgeting, into choosing that ring for you. It may sting to know you now want to change it.

Just be honest about the aspects you want to change and why. Maybe:

  • Your personal style has changed since you first got the ring, or
  • You want a setting that will keep the ring safe from damage given your active lifestyle, or
  • You’ve always had a dream of a specific ring and you know that with some minor adjustments your current ring will fulfill that dream.

Besides, upgrading or changing your ring is actually a wonderful way to symbolize your growth as a couple. (Feel free to quote this!)

Speak to the family
If your ring was a family heirloom, particularly from your partner’s side, it comes with a double dosing of potential hurt feelings: your partner’s and his family’s. To be completely fair to you though, while passing on a family heirloom engagement ring is a wonderful gesture and symbol of acceptance, it also imposes their sentimental values and style onto you, no matter how well-intended the gesture was.

Even so, we cannot stress enough that if you are hoping to reset your heirloom engagement ring, you need to speak to the original owner or owner’s family.

Again, be honest about what you’d like to change. If they are resistant it is perhaps better to honor that and go ahead with buying an altogether new ring that perfectly matches your style, vision and lifestyle.

2. The Physical Aspect

Now we get to the fun part: the physical ways you can reset or change your ring to match the ring you’ve always dreamed of.

Start with your budget
Obviously resetting your ring will cost extra money. It’s likely that if you’re at the point where resetting is even an option that your financial situation is quite different from the young, heady days of your engagement, where your ring was the result of months spent budgeting and living on canned beans. Regardless, you should think about your budget before trying to make decisions about exactly how you want to reset your ring. Replacing the main diamond itself with a bigger stone, for example, is going to cost you way more than just placing the original diamond in a different setting.

Shop around
Meet with at least three jewelers to find one you trust to recreate your vision without doing anything untoward to your current ring. Every jeweler is different: different ideas, different prices, and different artistic visions. Make sure your jeweler will do what you want and not what they want.

5 Top ways to reset your diamond ring

Now it’s time to decide exactly what you want to do with your ring. Here are our five top ways to completely refresh your rock:

  1. Add diamond or other accents
    Add some extra sparkle to your ring by switching the band to one with diamond accents set into the metal itself. This way, your original diamond is still the star, but it has a supporting cast designed to make it shine even more. Another way to add a subtle accent that will have terrific meaning to your ring, is to add an engraving to the band. (Insert heart eye emoji here!)
  2. Add more diamonds
    Turn your solitaire into a three-stone diamond ring. By adding medium or small diamonds either side of your current stone, you’re upping the sparkle factor and creating a bigger look overall. Again, this is a great option to boost your original diamond without replacing it altogether. (We’ll talk more about this later.)
    Another way to add to the size and sparkle of your ring – and completely change the look – is to add a halo of diamonds around your center stone. Can anyone say bling?!
  3. Add a pop of color
    Adding gemstones – like sapphires, rubies or emeralds, or really any gemstone, expensive or otherwise – can add a pop of color to your engagement ring and transform your ring completely. This has the added bonus of creating a completely personalized, unique look which will have specific meaning to you and you alone. (Here’s an idea: try adding your birth gemstone to your ring for added personal magic.) Add them as accents on your band, create a halo effect with them around your center stone (see above)
  4. Change the band
    Another way to change the look of your ring completely is to switch out the band for one made of a different metal. Yellow gold, white gold, platinum, rose gold, multi-tone… there are so many choices these days. What’s more, the style rules and trend of ‘matching’ your engagement and wedding bands are long gone – the only rules and trends that matter now are what you want and like!
  5. Change the setting
    Many engagement rings start out life with a taller, pointed setting like a cathedral or prong setting. Lifting the diamond out of these into a halo or cluster setting, for example, can really enhance your ring and place more prominence on the diamond itself. Another option is to switch to a bezel setting, where the metal surrounds the stone and protects it – a great option for those with active lifestyles where your ring has potential for damage.Alternatively, you may love the more traditional look of a cathedral setting and want to switch your ring to that style from a bezel setting, for example. This can change your ring from a modern look to one of traditional fairy tale… it’s really all just a matter of personal style!

Finally, there are times where you may want to switch out your original diamond altogether for a bigger, better quality rock to rock, or just ditch the original ring entirely for something new and completely different. While we do see this frequently with couples where they’ve been married for a while and/or with couples who have achieved much greater levels of financial success, this is not a course of action we recommend for most couples. It can be seen as insulting (remember the time, effort, thought and can-o-bean-budgeting that probably went into trying to buy that diamond for you originally?), and, as we’ve shown above, there are many other options to upgrade your rock!