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In the digital age, comparing options for fine jewelry has never been more convenient. In the past, it may have taken weeks to visit multiple jewelry stores to review their selections. Word of mouth was the only option for judging your potential experience with a jeweler and the value they might offer. Today, the internet has dawned a new era of fine jewelry shopping.

With just a few clicks, you can see details about the jewelry you’re considering and look up facts about the materials used. In fact, you might be comparing several big-name jewelry retailers in real-time on the same screen.

You don’t have to encounter any potential intimidation tactics from sales clerks while you compare your taste with the product they offer. You’re in control of your fine jewelry shopping experience now.

Keeping this in mind, there are several fine jewelry retailers that have a strong online presence and offer quality jewelry with added online perks like free shipping. Among these are Blue Nile, James Allen, Brilliant Earth, and Noémie.

Each has different strengths and weaknesses in their jewelry, but we’re going to dive into what each retailer has to offer in terms of personalized jewelry. To do this, let’s explore each retailer’s websites to rank the materials used, price, options for customized jewelry, and overall value based on shopper’s experience.

Personalized Jewelry

Because Brilliant Earth, James Allen, and Blue Nile have limited personalized jewelry options, we are going to compare specific products to keep the comparisons true. Where applicable, we will explore personalized jewelry options in the following categories as well. Let’s see how these retailers stack up against one another.

Materials Used

Noémie

Noémie is handcrafted jewelry, right from the start. You can shop their personalized jewelry selection or you can message the custom design team to sketch and handcraft any design of your dreams with a free returns policy.

Noémie offers 18K Yellow Gold, White Gold, Rose Gold, and Platinum, with diamond color and clarity of F/G and VS. For their personalized pendants, they also offer 18K Gold in different colors and even Black Gold.

No need to trade quality for customization, which is so often the case. Here, you get the best of both worlds, with excellent customer service every step of the way.

As an added comfort, Noémie also buys their diamonds from conflict-free sources, making their handcrafted jewelry both valuable and trustworthy.

Blue Nile’s Materials

It’s important to consider the materials used in the production of jewelry to determine how quality a piece truly is. Looking into Blue Nile’s materials for a customizable pendant, they offer 18-karat gold, as well as options for 14-karat white gold, rose gold, yellow gold, and platinum.

For their diamonds (which are claimed to be conflict-free), you can choose any color between K and D, and clarity between SI2 and FL, and a cut that ranges from good to “Astor Ideal.” Essentially, with Blue Nile, the jewelry may be handcrafted, but the value of your product is in your hands based on the materials you choose.

Brilliant Earth

For gold used in jewelry production, Brilliant Earth sticks to options of 18K Yellow Gold, 18K White Gold, 14K Rose Gold, and Platinum.

For diamond quality, they give you a choice between J and D color, SI2 to FL clarity, and fair to super ideal cut. Both Blue Nile and Brilliant Earth give the option to choose the exact diamond that will be used in your pendant, meaning you can scroll for hours trying to spot one that catches your eye.

Brilliant Earth claims to use conflict-free diamonds, but only a few of their hundreds of pieces are handcrafted jewelry.

James Allen

James Allen is part of the group that owns Zales and Kays, they offer 14K Yellow Gold, 14k White Gold, and Platinum for metal options to be used in a customizable pendant necklace.

After choosing your metal, you have three options: an earth-created diamond with good value, an earth-created diamond and a lab-created diamond. Choosing one of these categories means committing to a diamond that falls within that category’s color and clarity description. You can’t choose the exact diamond that’s going to be used.

The low end of their color and clarity is H-I and SI1-SI2, respectfully, and the high end is F-G color and VS1-VS2 clarity. Unfortunately, there is no result for handcrafted jewelry on the James Allen website.

Options for Personalized Jewelry

All of these companies provide options for creating personalized jewelry that is specific to you. Read on to see how their offerings and processes differ.

Blue Nile

As mentioned, Blue Nile has a very extensive “Build Your Own” section when it comes to building a custom pendant necklace. Upon searching for personalized jewelry, you will find that Blue Nile doesn’t have explicitly personalized jewelry as much as they have an assortment of engravable jewelry.

They offer sixty-two results for engravable pieces, each charging an additional fee for engraving. You have a selection to choose from if you’re not too overwhelmed with searching through each of those options to find the one that fits your needs.

Brilliant Earth

Brilliant Earth does offer some personalized jewelry, but most of it was marked unavailable when we checked their web catalog. Within this unavailable category, they offer silver or 18K gold charm necklaces, which can be engraved with an initial. However, there’s no telling when they would be marked available again.

Other than that, Brilliant Earth offers a customizable diamond necklace, which gives you the ability to choose the metal used, and the exact value of the diamond you’d like to be featured, with thousands of quality and price combinations.

James Allen

As we previously discovered, James Allen has no personalized jewelry on their web page. Additionally, they have no options for engravable jewelry.

The closest thing to personal you might be able to work with is a birthstone necklace, which James Allen does offer in twelve individual pieces, corresponding to each month.

Noémie

Noémie makes it simple by offering three core pieces of personalized jewelry. They offer 18K gold, personalized necklaces formed into the shape of a word or a name, with the option of white pavé diamonds set into your choice of metal.

Their next option is an engraved custom letter necklace with white diamonds encircling the initial in the middle.

Noémie also offers a custom ring builder that makes designing a quality diamond ring a seamless experience.

In addition to these three templates, Noémie takes personalization to a new level by offering a custom design service from their team of professional, in-house designers.

If you have a vision of a perfect piece of jewelry for yourself or a loved one, simply fill out the form and start crafting something 100% unique.

With no consultant’s fee and all the great Noémie customer perks (including free returns), this is one of the most compelling options for personalized jewelry available on the market.

Overall Value

Finally, we’ll compare the overall value that you receive from these online jewelers.

Blue Nile

Blue Nile makes finding the right piece somewhat challenging. Whether you’re attempting to customize a diamond ring or find a piece of engravable jewelry, searching at Blue Nile is not for the weak. To their credit, you most certainly have a lot of options.

As far as personalized rings go, Blue Nile can be affordable if you want it to be, but it’s your responsibility to choose materials to make it that way. For personalized engravable jewelry pieces, Blue Nile is affordable but uses slightly lower-quality materials overall.

Brilliant Earth

Brilliant Earth’s best quality might be how committed they claim they are to being conflict-free. Their personalized jewelry is quite limited, so there’s not much to say for their price or value in that aspect.

However, their customizable diamond pendant offers a myriad of options if you have the mental bandwidth to scroll through thousands of different possible combinations of metal, stone cut, color, and quality.

They offer free shipping on their jewelry, but they only offer free returns through the holiday season. Their price is fair, but not the winner for most affordable custom jewelry.

James Allen

Like Brilliant Earth, there’s not much to say for the price or value of their personalized jewelry because they don’t have a collection of such items. The closest comparison we can find is the value of their custom pendant option, which features a customizable diamond in a 14K gold setting for a reasonable price, but an 18K gold option would be more ideal.

Noémie

Noémie offers three central personalized jewelry options, which are easy to customize. Their quality, materials, free shipping and returns policy, handcrafted quality, and easy-to-use web experience make them a go-to choice for personalized jewelry.

With ease, you can select personalized jewelry for your loved one and easily see the quality of the materials used in the description.

You even have the option to work with professional designers to create a magnificent customer piece that matches your perfect vision. You’d be hard-pressed to find a custom jeweler online that offers this service at a reasonable price.

For their quality materials and enjoyable, easy customer experience, Noémie guarantees the best price so even If you find a better price anywhere else they will beat it for you.

Conclusion

When you’re looking for personalized jewelry, you want a process that’s easy, simple, and uses trustworthy, high-quality materials. The retailer that combines easy shopping, high-quality materials, and a trustworthy product has to be Noémie.

They ensure with a diamond price match guarantee that you’re getting the diamonds of your dreams for the lowest price. Their choices are just right—not overwhelming you with option paralysis. They handcraft their pieces, too, so you know your jewelry is being handled with an individual in mind, with a unique story to tell.