When my husband and I got married in October 2023, we invited over 100 of our closest family and friends to Newport, Rhode Island, to witness us swap personal vows and, of course, wedding bands: a thick platinum band for my husband and a thin, 14K white-gold halo adorned with single-prong diamonds for me. They say a ring symbolizes eternal love — it has no beginning and no end — but less than a month later, one of the diamonds on my wedding band fell off on a flight home from another friend’s wedding. Not exactly the happily ever after I was expecting with my new ring.
I was able to get my diamond band repaired, but I immediately became afraid of traveling with my pricey piece. What if another diamond fell off while I was searching through my carry-on? (Trust me, you don’t want to look for a teeny, tiny diamond on a crowded plane.) What if I accidentally left my ring in a hotel room? Or even worse: What if I had a Kim Kardashian moment and lost my diamonds in the ocean?
When it was time to embark on our three-week honeymoon to Asia — where there would be flights, lots of hotels, and, yes, the ocean — I knew I didn’t want to bring my diamond band on vacation. But showing up to my honeymoon sans band wasn’t my idea of romance, and I was desperate for an alternative. So I bought us both travel engagement rings on Amazon for a grand total of $30.
From rugged silicone bands to bad diamond dupes, faux bands often have a reputation for looking cheap, but I really wanted to find options that looked similar to our real rings. My husband’s platinum “comfort fit” band was relatively easy to copy — I ultimately selected one that both resembled his ring and was billed as being supercomfortable. Mine was a little more challenging. I wanted to re-create the sparkle of my original band, but I was nervous that the single-prong setting might mean another loose stone during my travels. (Even if it was cubic zirconia, I didn’t want to stare at a wedding band with a missing stone during my honeymoon.) My engagement ring has a pavé band, and when I’d traveled with it before I’d never had any problems (stones in a pavé setting are typically held with thin metal beads, so they’re a bit more secure). I set out to find a stand-in wedding band with a similar pavé style to my engagement ring and ultimately selected EAMTI’s 2 mm 925 sterling-silver wedding band for a few reasons: It was cheap, it had good reviews, and it was shiny. However, the microscopic cubic-zirconia stones weren’t so big that they would look flashy and obviously fake.
When the rings arrived, I was honestly pretty surprised by how real they did look. Mine isn’t a dead ringer for my real one, but it’s thin and sparkly and has that “delicate everyday” quality I was looking for leading up to my nuptials. Not only is my husband’s EAMTI 2 mm 4 mm 6mm white-gold-plated band a spitting image of his real one — I’ve even confused the two when they’re both on his nightstand table — but his travel band is slightly thinner (and more comfortable) than his real one.
During our honeymoon, we swam at Thai islands, bathed elephants in Chiang Mai, and rolled our suitcases through Tokyo and Singapore. Never once did we worry about damaging our rings. After all, our love may be forever, but we can always use our Prime membership to replace our travel rings. But that’s the thing: It has been almost a year, and we’ve never needed to replace them. We have brought these rings to Iceland, Hawaii, and Mexico City and — save for a few scuffs on my husband’s band and a very temporary metal discoloration on mine while in a thermal bath — they’ve remained in solid shape. And as someone who has spent weeks on end wearing these rings, I can confirm they won’t turn your finger green.
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