Trust · how we work
How We Weigh a Piece
Every piece of writing here has to answer one question a shopping magazine usually skips: on what evidence? The rule that follows from it is short. Every factual claim about a brand traces to that brand's own site, a grading laboratory, a named publication or a review platform — and the page says which. Dated claims carry the date. If a number is not in our sources, the article does not state it.
We are an honest aggregator, not an insider. We do not wear the clothes, grade the stones or work a bench, and nothing on this site claims we do. What we can do is read the documentation carefully, put the numbers side by side, and be explicit about which figures are the brand's and which are ours.
The five things we record
Every entry runs the same five-part sheet, so a $250 pair of studs and a $4,200 chain are judged on one page rather than two moods.
- Materials
- What the piece is actually made of: metal and karat, gram weight where it is published, stone type and carat weight, and whether a stone is natural, lab-grown, moissanite or treated. Any grade we quote names the laboratory that issued it in the same sentence, because GIA, IGI and AGI grades are not interchangeable.
- Construction
- How it is put together and where: setting type, clasp, lining and facing, country of manufacture, and whether the maker publishes that at all. A brand that does not say where a piece is made is recorded as not saying, not as suspect and not as domestic.
- Price and price context
- The published price, the catalogue range around it, and what that money buys against the field. Prices are snapshots with a date attached; we link to the brand rather than pretending our figure is live.
- Terms
- The part that decides whether a purchase is reversible: return window, who pays return shipping, which categories are final sale, made-to-order lead times, resizing tolerance, and warranty or repair coverage. We attribute these to the brand rather than restating them as our own assurance.
- Cost per wear and resale
- Price divided by an honest wear count, net of any resale recovery we can actually point at. Where there is no secondary-market data for a brand — which is common — we say there is none rather than estimating one.
Where the numbers come from
Prices, price ranges, materials statements, sizing charts and returns terms come from each brand's own site and product data, recorded with the date we read them. Stone disclosures come from the brand's product copy and, where one exists, the grading report. Stockist and press information is checked against the third party, not the brand.
Press provenance. A brand's press page is a claim, not a citation. Every press entry in our brand files is marked as verified, or as something the brand reports, claims, or that we have not independently read — and thirty of the hundred and six entries currently on file are in that second group, including a citation whose link pointed back at the brand's own website. We name an outlet only where we read the outlet's page. Anything else is attributed to the brand in the sentence itself and never counted toward a “featured in” tally.
Merchant claims stay quarantined. When a brand says its pieces are waterproof, its diamonds are D/E VVS, its returns are easy or its gold is responsibly sourced, that is reported as the brand's statement, with the brand named. We have found merchants publishing claims that contradict their own policy pages. Those are stories, not sources.
Prices move constantly, so every figure on the site is a snapshot with a date on it. The live number is whatever the brand is charging when you click through, which is why our links go to the brand rather than to a price we cannot keep current.
The Pennyweight Verdict
Anything that recommends a purchase closes with a fixed three-band call — buy at full price, buy on sale, or skip — with the reasoning in one sentence and the number that drove it. The bands are set on net cost per wear, and you can run the same arithmetic yourself on the calculator. A verdict is a call, not a score, and we do not manufacture a winner to sell a click.
Independence and disclosure are covered separately on our editorial standards page. Think a figure is wrong? Tell us — corrections are the fastest way to improve a file.