Yes this platinum, diamond, solitaire engagement looks great.  How many carats is that?  Two carats?  Jesus H.  The ring looks great, but seriously, look at that thing:  it’s just too good to be true.  I’ve never seen a tension setting like that and, really, I don’t think one like that could work.  That diamond would pop out of there like a piece of kettle corn.

The setting is one of the trickiest things about designing a cool ring.  The setting is functionally important (keep that ice in!), but it’s either got weird prongs; some huge bevel set or you get a headache just looking at all the tension in a tension set.  Really, do you want the symbol of your marriage to be constant tension?

Ideally a diamond could just hover over the ring like a perfect satelite (diamonds are forever, Mr. Bond) and refract all the light it can without disrupting the continuity of the ring itsself.  Could someone work on that - the hover-set diamond?  Thanks.

Look at these rings!   I love the three diamond gold ring with the interresting curved setting.  Also, what do you think about that simple gold band with the 7 diamond cluster.  For that one I especially like how the setting prongs are incorporated into the clustering pattern.  The three-band eternity design with the honkin’ diamond right in the middle is definetly interesting, but perhaps not my taste.

Claddagh… According to Wikipedia Claddagh is an area in Ireland close to the center of Galway city, where the Corrib River meets Galway Bay.

Essentially, Claddagh became famous for these rings of friendship and marriage which depict two hands clasping a crowned heart.

I liked this part on modern usage:

Claddaghs continue to be worn, primarily by those of Irish heritage, as both a cultural symbol and as engagement and wedding rings.[1] At their Celtic Pagan handfasting, Scottish American musician Jim Morrison of The Doors and Irish American author Patricia Kennealy-Morrison exchanged claddagh rings.[4] A picture of the rings was included on the cover of Kennealy-Morrison’s memoir, Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison, and the claddaghs can be seen in most of her author photos as well.[4]

Claddagh rings have made periodic appearances in movies and television, often as a plot device to indicate the ethnic origins or relationship status of a character, to illustrate wedding scenes, or to subtly indicate that the relationship of two characters has changed. In a scene loosely based on the above wedding ceremony, Val Kilmer and Kathleen Quinlan, as fictional versions of Morrison and Kennealy-Morrison, are seen exchanging the rings in Oliver Stone’s movie, The Doors.[4]

Sometimes authors of fiction and fantasy works have given the ring a somewhat altered or fanciful symbolism to better suit their purposes, such as writer/director Joss Whedon’s use of the ring as a recurring plot device in the television series, Buffy The Vampire Slayer.[5] Whedon reinterpreted the meaning of the ring - when worn on the left hand, facing in, in the usual “married” configuration - as meaning, “the wearer is destined to be with his or her love forever.”[5] While the actual meaning ascribed to the ring in this instance is incorrect,[1] it is used in much the same way as claddaghs have been used in more traditional roles in fiction: to provide an ongoing visual reference to the type of relationship that exists between two of the lead characters, Buffy and Angel.