Is it okay to sleep with an engagement ring on?

About once a month, a client comes in with a bent prong or a missing pavé stone and tells me she never takes her ring off, not even to sleep. I get it. The ring is new and you don't want to set it down. But sleep is where I see a lot of preventable damage happen. The short answer is no, it's not ideal. If you do it every night, something will eventually catch.

Sheets, pillowcases, and blankets are woven fabric with tiny loops. A prong tip is maybe 0.3mm. It doesn't take much for a prong to snag a thread, lift a few millimeters, and then catch again the next night. Over six months that prong works itself loose. In a micro-pavé band, the little stones are held by even smaller beads of metal. I've had clients lose stones and never feel it happen until morning.

The worst case I saw last spring: Priya fell asleep wearing an heirloom ring, a thin French-cut pavé band that had been redone twice already. She woke up with two diamonds missing and a prong folded flat. We found one stone in the seam of the fitted sheet. The other we never found.

Now, if your ring is a simple 6-prong solitaire with a substantial band, the risk is lower. A sturdy 2.4mm band and well-tipped prongs won't fail because you dozed off once. But even then, night is when hands swell, rings get caught in hair, and you push them under pillows and into mattresses. Metal does deform under repeated pressure, especially thin settings.

I take my own rings off at night. I keep a small ceramic dish on the nightstand, and I put the ring in it face-up. Not on the edge of the sink, not wrapped in a tissue. A tissue is how you accidentally throw away a $9,000 ring. The dish costs about fifteen dollars and solves most of it.

If you absolutely cannot stand to take it off, get it checked every six months. Also, look at the prongs under a 10x loupe once a week. The day you see one lifted or a stone wiggling, bring it in before it's gone.