28 Ethical Engagement Rings You Can Feel Really Good About | Wedding Warriors TC | Wedding Planner

Maybe it’s because I work at APW, surrounded by fierce, ambitious, and community-minded females, but I strongly believe that women-owned companies are indisputably changing the world. Case in point: MiaDonna is a female-founded and led company that is changing the diamond industry one engagement ring at a time. In 2005, MiaDonna founder and CEO Anna-Mieke Anderson discovered that her own diamond ring was probably a conflict diamond. She responded by sponsoring a child in a diamond mining community, and his letters opened her eyes to exactly what that meant. She says, “I will never forget the day he wrote to me and said, ‘I had a great summer because only one of my classmates was killed.’ That, right there, changed my life forever, so I did something about it.”

What she did was build a company that offers beautiful, ethical engagement rings that won’t break the bank and a foundation that empowers communities to grow food instead of mining for diamonds.

While conflict-free diamonds aren’t a new concept, MiaDonna takes it one step further, with carbon-neutral production, sustainable materials, and an effort to rebuild the communities that have been negatively impacted by the diamond mining trade. Through their charity foundation, The Greener Diamond, MiaDonna contributes a portion of profits from every sale (as well as numerous person-hours and administrative support) to fund education, mentorship, agricultural, and urgent relief programs in diamond mining regions. In fact, in 2017, they contributed more than 20 percent of profits to Greener Diamond initiatives. Which means that when you look down at your ring, you can feel jazzed about your awesome relationship and the small part you were able to play in reversing the damage caused by the traditional earth-mined diamond trade.

But let’s talk about exactly what kind of ring you will be admiring. MiaDonna offers all kinds of designs from vintage to modern, and three stone, solitaire, halo, diamond accented, and two-tone options. And if you can’t quite find exactly what you want, their team of artisans would love nothing more than to custom design your dream engagement ring. All of MiaDonna’s designs feature high-quality recycled precious metals and conflict-free lab-grown diamonds or Chatham lab-grown gemstones. They are physically, chemically and visually identical to mined diamonds, but they are free of any negative environmental and social impact and cost up to 40 percent less than mined diamonds (woot!).

And MiaDonna makes shopping for an engagement ring over the Internet ridiculously easy, from tons of images (including 360-degree views) of all rings, a super intuitive website with a “build-your-ring” feature that tells you the exact pricing for your selected setting, stone, and metal to a free(!) home try-on program that lets you sample three different settings for five days. So without further ado, here are twenty-eight of my favorite rings MiaDonna has to offer.