This wedding season, never mind death-defying aerial proposals and elaborate flash mobs: A San Francisco inventor is once again raising the bar for men after toiling for months on an engagement ring that lights up whenever he approaches his lucky fiancée.
In the game of "weddings according to man," guys love upstaging each other (sometimes even the girl is amused, too). Ben Kokes slogged for five months to craft the glowing band, failing nine times in the process with engagement rings that didn't flare up properly.
Blogging about the winter-to-spring process, Kokes revealed that he'd been hiding out in a machine shop grappling with epoxy, grit sandpaper, carbide drills and other power tools to forge the ring, which also boasts 23 stones.
"Once upon a time, a boy met a girl. Then a short amount of time later, the boy decided to design and build a ring for the girl, because doing things in the most complicated way possible is just what he does to show the love," Kokes wrote on his blog.
The inventor used LED and a copper coil that activated via transmitter, a magnetic bracelet Kokes concealed under his jacket sleeve.
The goal was this: Whenever Kokes neared the apple of his eye, Julie, her titanium ring would feel his presence and shoot rays of light out through the stones. And so on the day he proposed earlier this month, the ring shone brightly like he was some powerful deity it wouldn't do to reject.
Kokes is now remodelling the ring so that the stones don't fall out over time: "The original plan was to present this ring to the girl, then take her to a professional jeweller the next day to pick out something more permanent," he clarified. "Well, she insists that I change the design on this ring to make it more permanent and forgo a professionally made ring."
Some CTV readers wondered how Julie would sleep in the conjugal bed with a disco-ball ring on her finger. Another cynical reader urged the fiancée to run before she finds herself planning vacations alone as hubby hides away in the machine shop. (As one of my more hardened colleagues put it, "It's a great early warning system for her if she decides to sleep with the milkman." Ouch.)
Others found the elaborate gesture touching. There's something endearing about a dude disguising his love in a hardware project, and thankfully, she said yes.
Zosia Bielski