Tennis Bracelet Settings
Choosing a Bracelet Setting
With all these new fangled websites offering you the opportunity to design your own jewelry, you may suffer from the modern era syndrome of having way too many choices and getting dizzy and falling over and hurting your shoulder. To prevent this from happening, here is a quick guide to the four basic settings you can have for tennis bracelets, otherwise known as eternity bracelets. This is because tennis has been around for eternity. Or probably not.
Prong Setting – Prong settings for eternity bracelets are the most popular setting today. If you’re wondering what a prong setting is, just meditate on the word “prong” for a while and you’ll figure it out. Five minutes…ok. Now that you’ve meditated and have a good idea, a prong setting is where the metal that holds the diamond of an eternity bracelet in place sticks out like a prong on all four sides of the diamond. So if the prongs were extended, you could impale people with your eternity bracelet. Since jewelry companies don’t generally want their customers doing this, eternity bracelet prongs are short. If you consider yourself a prongy type of person, then the prong setting eternity bracelet is for you.
Channel Setting – Channel settings are just what they suggest. Channels. Since that doesn’t really explain anything, think of a channel—not a TV channel—but a channel of water. It’s enclosed by two banks, a river. No imagine the water as a river of diamonds that aren’t moving. And no imagine the banks as thin strips of metal holding the diamonds in place on either side. The result is a channel, a river, or diamonds in an eternity bracelet without the prongs. You can’t impale anybody, but the diamonds are seamless and right up next to one another. Pick a channel setting for your eternity bracelet if you want to see an uninterrupted stream of diamonds.
Bezel Setting – If you’ve ever taken apart a laptop for parts and tried to sell them, you should know what a bezel is. A bezel is something that encapsulates whatever is inside it, so the bezel of a laptop is what holds the laptop guts together, all the chips and such. Analogize that to an eternity bracelet and you have a bracelet where each diamond is surrounded by a metal setting. You should get a bezel setting if you like laptops. Or alternatively, metal, or the metal on diamond look.
Half Bezel Setting – Much like the half Windsor knot is to the Windsor knot in the necktie realm, so is the half bezel setting to the bezel setting in the eternity bracelet realm. The half bezel resembles a channel setting, but channel strip is sort of angled in to fill in the gaps between the diamonds so the metal moves in an out like a wave. The result is that each diamond is almost completely surrounded save the spot where each diamond touches the next. You should get this setting if you like wavey looking things.
