Sales of engagement rings have risen sharply when compared to the same time last year.
At least part of this has been attributed to people being in lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Chris Andrews is operations director at Dublin jeweller Weir & Sons.
He told Newstalk Breakfast: "It's massively up on the same month last year.
"It doesn't quite make up for all the time that we lost, obviously, during COVID but people are still getting engaged - and ring sales seem to be up at the moment which is great".
"I think probably COVID helped in the sense that people were living together, and if they could get through COVID they probably thought 'Well, maybe now's the time to pop the question' and I think that's definitely helped".
"It's a funny one caused I was reading somewhere that people are saying that wedding ring sales are down - we're actually finding the opposite.
"People are still buying wedding rings as well.
"So they're obviously getting married, but they're not having maybe the big events that they were having in the past".
"July was running at roughly three-times the amount of engagement rings that we sold last year.
"And we're double so far in August".
Asked about how the pandemic has changed the ring-buying experience, he said: "We've got private rooms set up and we have the screens obviously in place so that people can come and browse and have a look at the rings.
Weir & Sons on Dublin's Grafton Street | Image: Supplied"And then obviously if people try rings on, we can clean them and make sure that everything's completely disinfected afterwards.
"It's very much happening at the moment, and we're also seeing a lot more people buying online.
"We've done a few FaceTimes with people and...we can send a kit out to people so that we can get the ring size - so that when the ring is actually sent out, that it's the correct size and it will fit on the finger".
"It hasn't really changed styles, to be honest with you, but styles are changing a bit in lab-grown diamond rings".
Andrew explained: "It is a real diamond: it is a diamond that is man-made in a lab, as opposed to mined out of the ground".
"They are coming in at roughly around 40% of the price of a natural [diamond] - that's the differentiation between the two".
