What a divorce ring is
A divorce ring is a ring bought, or had made, to mark the end of a marriage. That is the entire definition. There is no metal or stone that belongs to it, no rule about what it should look like, and nothing attached to it in the way that a wedding band has a ceremony attached. Most people wear one on the right hand. Some move it to the left middle finger, next to where the old rings sat. Plenty buy one and leave it in a drawer for a year first.You will also see them called freedom rings and liberation rings. We do not use either word, and almost nobody who writes to us about this uses them either. People tend to describe what they want instead of naming it: something to wear on that hand again, or something made out of what is already there.
The short versionAny ring you buy for yourself when a marriage ends is a divorce ring. There is no correct finger, no established custom, and no obligation to buy one at all. Doing nothing for now is the commonest thing people do, and it is not a failure to decide.
The reasons people give us are practical more often than they are symbolic. The commonest is the plainest: a finger that has worn a ring every day for eleven years feels wrong empty, and the hand keeps reaching for something that is not there. The second is the mark. A band worn long enough leaves a groove and a pale stripe that take months to even out, and the mark is what prompts other people to ask. A ring covers it. The third is closest to what the category is sold as: an object bought on a particular day, with your own money, chosen without consulting anybody.Where the idea came from
Divorce rings are not a tradition, and that is worth saying early, because a good deal of what is written about them implies otherwise. As a retail category the idea is roughly a decade old. It arrived the way most new jewellery occasions arrive: somebody in the trade noticed an event that a great many people go through, and began making rings for it. Push presents came the same way. So, for that matter, did the modern engagement ring, whose whole shape owes itself to an advertising campaign that ran from the 1940s.None of which makes it a bad idea. It makes it a commercial one, and you should be able to see the seams. Nobody has to buy anything to have got through something. If a jeweller tells you that a divorce ring is what people do now, they are describing what they would like people to do now.
On numbers, since there are noneWe do not know how many Australians buy a ring at the end of a marriage, and neither does anybody else. There is no survey and no ABS category for it, so any market size you are quoted has been invented. What we can tell you is what we see, which is a small number of people a year, most of them asking about a ring they already own rather than a new one.
Which hand, and which finger
This is the question we are asked first, and underneath it is usually a different question: whether anyone will notice, and whether they will say anything. Here are the four positions, drawn together, with what each one tends to be read as.
Where the ring goes, and what it saysThe four positions people actually move to, and the one that involves no ring at allNone of these means anything official in Australia. The advice you will read about moving a ring to the right hand comes from traditions where a wedding ring is worn on the right hand to begin with, and from the custom in some of them of a widow moving her ring across. Here it is not a signal most people will read, which is either the point or the problem depending on what you want from it.
One practical thing gets missed in all of this. Your two hands are not the same size. Moving an existing ring to the other hand usually means resizing it, generally upward, and a ring that is nearly right will spin on one hand and stick on the other. Our sizing guide covers how to measure properly before you commit to a size.The other is height. An engagement ring is designed to be looked at, so the stone usually sits high on claws, and high settings catch on things. Put one on the hand you open doors and carry bags with and it will find every doorframe in the house. It is the single most common reason a ring that moves hands comes back to us a few months later with a bent claw.Right handRight ring fingerReads as deliberateThe most common move, and the only one most people recognise as meaning anything. Expect it to need resizing: for most of us the dominant hand runs a quarter to half a size larger.
Right handRight middle fingerReads as jewelleryNobody attaches a meaning to this finger, which is the appeal. It also takes a wider band comfortably, and wide plain bands are what people tend to choose here.
Left handLeft middle fingerReads as almost nothingClosest to the old habit, on the hand that is used to the weight. It sits beside the mark rather than over it, which some people prefer and some find worse.
Left handNothing at allReads loudest, for a whileThe groove and the pale stripe take a few months to even out. After that the empty finger stops registering, usually sooner than people expect it to.
The ring you already have
Before anything gets bought there is usually a ring in a drawer, and that ring is what most people are really writing to ask about. There are five things that can be done with it. Four of them cost less than buying something new, and one of them costs nothing at all.
Five things you can do with a ring you already ownReversible means you can still change your mind later without the stone leaving your handsCosts are what we would quote in Australia for the bench work described, in Australian dollars, and they move with the gold price and with how complicated the design is. None of them includes buying a new stone. A remake or a reset is priced per job rather than off a list, so treat these as the range a quote usually lands in.
Selling deserves its own paragraph, because the number surprises people every time. A ring bought at retail sells second-hand for a fraction of what was paid, and that is as true of a natural diamond as it is of a lab-grown one. The retail price of a new ring includes the setting, the making, the shopfront and the margin, and none of that comes back. Get more than one offer, expect offers rather than valuations, and do not treat the figure on an insurance valuation as a price. That number is a replacement cost, which is a different thing and always a larger one. Our guide to selling a diamond goes through who actually buys here and what each kind of buyer pays.Leave it aloneThe ring goes in a box and stays there. Nothing is spent and nothing is decided, and every other line on this list is still available in a year.
CostNothing
WaitNone
Can it be undone
Reversible
Have it remadeThe stone comes out, the metal is reworked or replaced, and what you get back is a ring you chose rather than one you were given. Covered in detail below.
CostUsually $1,200 to $4,000 for a single stone
WaitFour to eight weeks
Can it be undone
Partly reversible
Reset the stone as a pendantThe same diamond, off the hand entirely. This is the request we get most often from people who do not want to wear a ring but do not want to sell the stone either.
CostFrom about $600 with a simple bezel and chain
WaitThree to five weeks
Can it be undone
Partly reversible
Split the stones between childrenOnly possible when there is more than one stone. A three stone ring or a set band divides naturally into two or three small pieces; a single solitaire does not divide at all.
Cost$500 to $1,500 for each piece made
WaitSix to ten weeks
Can it be undone
Final
Sell itThe only option that returns money, and the one that disappoints most people. A ring bought at retail resells for a fraction of what was paid, whether the stone is natural or lab-grown.
CostReturns a fraction of what was paid
WaitWeeks to months, depending on who buys it
Can it be undone
Final
What we would say across the counterDo nothing for a year. Everything on that list is still there in twelve months, a diamond does not deteriorate in a drawer, and the ring you would design in the first month after a separation is rarely the ring you would design in the thirteenth. The one exception is money. If you need it now, sell it now, and do not let anybody make you feel sentimental about a decision you cannot afford to postpone.
Having it remade
A remake is the thing jewellers are asked for most often in this situation, and the thing people most often misunderstand. It sounds like an alteration. It is not. It is a new ring built around an old stone, and the four steps below are what that involves.
Small stones are set into a particular piece of metal, one at a time, and they do not transfer. It is why a pavé band costs more to remake than a plain one, and why a full eternity ring is usually a stone recovery job rather than a remake.If you do go ahead, there is one piece of design advice we would give unprompted: ask for something that does not look like an engagement ring. A remade solitaire that still reads as a solitaire tends to be worn twice and then not again. East to west instead of north to south, a bezel instead of claws, a wider band, yellow gold instead of white. Small changes, and they are the difference between a ring you wear and a ring you have.
A solitaire becoming a ring for the other handMetal drawn in ink, the stone in gold, so you can follow the one part that survivesThe order our bench works in. Every stone is examined under magnification before it goes back into anything, because damage found afterwards is a far worse conversation than damage found first.
There are three things worth knowing before you say yes, and a jeweller who wants the work has no particular reason to raise any of them.Step 1The ring as it isPhotographed, weighed and checked against its grading report if it has one. Do this before anybody touches it, particularly if the ring is insured.
Step 2The stone comes outThe claws are cut back and the diamond is lifted. This is the point of no return. From here the original ring no longer exists, and no amount of money brings it back.
Step 3A new ring is madeDrawn, modelled, cast and filed. Your old gold can go into the melt, though it saves less than people hope: the metal is the cheap part and the making is not.
Step 4The stone goes back inUsually lower and better protected than it was. A stone that sat high in claws on the left hand takes a beating on the right, which is the hand that opens doors.
The part that cannot be undoneYou cannot un-remake a ring. Step two is irreversible in a way people do not always feel until they see the stone sitting loose on a bench mat. If there is any chance you will want the original back, in ten years or for a child, the answer is not a remake. It is a photograph and a drawer.
Then there is the girdle. Claws sit on the outside edge of a stone and take knocks the stone would otherwise take itself, and after a decade of daily wear there is quite often a small chip or a bruise hiding under one of them. It has been there for years, invisible, which is exactly what claws are for. A new setting may not cover the same spot, and occasionally the honest answer is that the stone wants a light recut first, which costs money and a little weight. We would rather tell you that at the start than show you afterwards.Last is the bill. A remake is bespoke bench work: someone draws it, models it, casts it, sets the stone by hand and finishes it. That is most of the cost of making a new ring, with only the stone taken out of the equation, and the stone is usually the part people assumed they were paying for. Reusing your own gold changes the arithmetic less than it feels like it should.Who the ring belongs to in Australia
We are jewellers, not lawyers, and what follows is general information rather than advice. It is worth knowing mostly so that you do not spend energy on the wrong worry.Once a marriage has actually taken place, an engagement ring in Australia is generally treated as a gift, and a gift belongs to the person who received it. It does not go back at the end of the marriage. Asking for it back is a request rather than a legal position, and it is usually about something other than the ring.In a property settlement everything either of you owns forms part of the pool in principle, jewellery included. In practice jewellery is rarely a line anybody argues about, because its value has to be material next to a house, a superannuation balance and a car before it can change an outcome. Where a ring is genuinely valuable, or where there is a collection rather than a ring, it is a real asset and gets valued like any other.
Photograph it before you change anythingIf the ring is insured, or if it is likely to come up in a settlement conversation, photograph it and keep the grading report and the receipt before a jeweller touches it. Remaking something that is still named on a policy or still sitting on a list of assets is a tidy way to create an argument you did not need to have.
A broken engagement, where the wedding never happened, is a different question with different answers, and it has been argued in Australian courts rather more than divorce-era jewellery has. It is not covered here. And the sentence we have to write plainly: none of this is legal advice, and none of it is tailored to your situation. If there is a real dispute about a ring, or about anything else, get your own advice from a family lawyer. One appointment costs less than most of the options on this page.What people actually buy
When somebody does buy a ring for themselves at the end of a marriage, it tends to look nothing like the one it follows, and the pattern is consistent enough to set out. Almost nobody buys a solitaire. A single stone raised on claws is the shape of the ring they already had, and repeating it in a different metal is not what anyone is after.
The pattern, as it arrives at our counter
The other consistent thing has nothing to do with the ring. It is chosen alone. Every one of these could be bought with a friend for company, and most of them are not: people book the appointment by themselves, and afterwards that is the part they mention more often than the design.There is also no convention about what to spend, which is the one genuinely useful thing about a category nobody has had time to build rules around. A plain gold band starts in the hundreds. A set stone starts wherever a set stone starts. If anybody tries to anchor you to a number or a multiple of your salary, they have borrowed the anchor from engagement rings, where it was written by an advertising agency and has never had anything behind it.What gets chosen
A wide plain band, more often yellow gold than white.
A bezel or another low setting, because it is going on the working hand.
A coloured stone: sapphire, spinel, a green tourmaline. Something nobody would mistake for an engagement ring.
Two or three fine bands worn as a stack, added to over years rather than bought at once.
A signet, or a plain ring with a date inside it where nobody else can see it.
What almost nobody chooses
A solitaire. It is the shape of the ring this one follows, and people arrive already knowing they do not want it.
A halo, for the same reason.
Anything that has to be explained before it makes sense.
A matching set. Nobody wants a second thing to take off.
A ring that needs a story attached to it to be worth wearing.
If you are not sure yet
Most people who write to us about this are not sure, and a fair few open by apologising for asking. There is nothing to apologise for, and there is no schedule.A ring is only an object, so nothing about it is urgent. It is also the object in the house with the most attention on it, so nothing about it feels ordinary. Both stay true at once, and that is why the decision tends to sit around for a long time. In the meantime it is a piece of gold with a stone in it, and it will keep in a drawer indefinitely without deteriorating, losing value or asking you anything.If you want an order to do things in: photograph it, put it somewhere you will not open by accident, and give it a year. In a year you will know a great deal more about what a ring for you should be than you do today. If it turns out you want the money instead, sell it then. And if the drawer turns out to be the answer, that is an answer too, and it is the one most people end up at.
Not sure what to do with a ring you already own?Send us a photograph, and the grading report if there is one. We will tell you what it would cost to remake, what it would cost to reset the stone as something you would actually wear, and whether we think you should do either of them yet. We are perfectly happy to say leave it in the drawer.
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