Wedding band won’t come off? – you can lose your finger.
When your knuckles get larger with age or when you gain weight, your rings will start to push into flesh and may become impossible to take off. This can be dangerous. The blood vessels taking blood from the finger are located below the skin while the feeder veins run deeper. A too tight ring will block the outflow of blood causing the finger to swell as blood is continuously pumped into the finger.
Swollen fingers pinched by too small rings are unsightly. Please do not snip at it with a side cutter (you will harm yourself) but ask a goldsmith to resize your rings before your finger turns blue and the possibility of permanent damage arises. Professional goldsmiths use a specially designed tool to carefully saw through the too-tight band, then open the band with two pliers and add a piece of gold to enlarge the size.
Other reasons for resizing are:
*An incorrect finger size was measured initially. It may have been a very hot day or your may have come from the gym or just off an overseas flight – all reasons for a swollen hand. If so, your jeweller should put your hand under cold running water before taking the finger size.
*The ring was bought in a hurry, or as a surprise, and the buyer did not know the correct finger size.
Risky to resize a ring.
There is always a risk in resizing a ring. It is a jeweller’s nightmare when a client returns the next day screaming: “You worked on my ring, now I lost the diamond.” However, if the sizing and quality checks were done properly, this should not happen.
Methods of resizing
If a ring needs to be enlarged by a few sizes only, it can normally be stretched with special tools. Enlargement by more than 2 sizes requires the soldering in of extra metal, which is time consuming. When a ring contains more than one gem, especially if the stones touch each other, the enlargement may cause the stones to push against each other causing damage to their girdles.
Equally time consuming is to make a ring smaller. It also requires soldering, polishing and often rhodium plating. When making a ring smaller the claws and tube settings normally “open up” and stones may become loose.
Shake the ring close to your ear and you can normally hear a largish stone rattling inside an insecure setting. Touch a small stone with a pair of tweezers – if it moves, it is loose. It is the responsibility of a jeweller to ensure that when you leave his store the stones are well set, even if he has to reset them after sizing.
Visit our team of professional consultants to measure your correct finger size or to assist you with adjustments.
