After her boyfriend, Brandon Poole, proposed with a delicate pink sapphire and diamond three-stone ring, Lauren Dacorro started shopping for his engagement jewelry.
“I think it’s kind of stupid that only females have engagement rings to show that they’re taken,” says Dacorro, 23. “I think guys should have one too —it’s an equality thing.”
The male engagement ring — once a jewelry industry pipe-dream — is becoming a reality, thanks to tradition-spinning millennials and a handful of trendsetting celebs. Searches for the masculine baubles are up 66 percent since last year, according to a recent report by global fashion search platform Lyst.
Lyst credits some of the increase to male same-sex couples wearing rings to mark their engagements, but notes that famous heterosexual guys — such as Ed Sheeran and Michael Bublé —all sport versions of the egalitarian accessories.
Dacorro, a student living in California’s Bay Area, says she got the idea from “Crazy Ex-
Girlfriend” star Skylar Astin, who posted a photo of his intricately braided silver ring on Instagram when he got engaged to actress Anna Camp in January 2016. “It always felt odd to me that men didn’t get engagement rings,” Astin captioned the shot. “Thankfully, my fiancé thought so, too.”
Matthew Rogich — a 31-year-old student who got engaged to his partner of over five years, Joshua Lattimore, late last month — says they got sleek, silver Tiffany bands to mark the happy occasion.
“For gay couples, there really isn’t a standard,” he says of the decision to both wear engagement rings. “But [Josh] thought it would be very weird to give me a ring that suggests publicly that I’m tied to somebody . . . and not have that visual sign that he is in a committed relationship, too.”
Rogich, who lives in River Vale, NJ, says the matching rings will do double duty as their wedding bands. “Neither one of us wants to wear two rings,” he says, adding that they do plan to get them engraved to commemorate the marriage.
For Dacorro and Poole, 25, his phosphorescent tungsten and meteorite band, found on Etsy, serves as a symbol of their equitable bond.
“I joked for about a month that Lauren was engaged and I wasn’t,” Poole says of the time it took to find his ring, and for her to officially propose back to him with it.
Now, “she’s a bit jealous that mine glows in the dark.”
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