Endless Time and Jewelry Blog
January 28th, 2015
Sofia Vergara and Joe Manganiello have been engaged for about a month, but getting a good look at her engagement diamond has been a bit of a challenge — until Sunday night in Los Angeles at the SAG Awards.

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Walking the red carpet together, the Modern Family starlet and her True Blood fiancé posed for the paparazzi, spoke openly about their upcoming nuptials and even offered a close-up look at the new engagement bling via the E! News Mani Cam.

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“Huge,” “massive” and “planet-sized” were some of the words celebrity journalists used to describe the oval center diamond of Vergara’s halo-style engagement ring — a ring estimated to be worth about $500,000.

An anonymous tipster told Glamour columnist Kim Fusaro that Vergara’s diamond was 7 carats in size, the same size as the diamond worn by Manganiello’s mother, but Fusaro reasoned that the diamond must be even larger.

“Sofia is 5'7" so it’s not like she has child-size hands,” Fusaro wrote, “and that center stone is almost as wide as her finger.”

We referenced our millimeter-to-carat conversion chart to validate Fusaro's theory. A close look at the photo shows that the orientation of the ring has the narrower dimension of the oval diamond extending across the width of her finger. Assuming Vergara’s ring finger is approximately 15mm wide at the base, and the oval stone is 14mm x 12mm, the carat weight would be 8.21 carats. If the diamond is 16mm x 14 mm, it would convert to 11.88 carats.

During an interview with Access Hollywood, Vergara — television’s highest-paid actress — joked about the ring’s size. “You know me, it's all about the bling-bling, so he knew what I needed,” she said. “I opened it up and I checked it to see.”

And what if the ring didn’t meet her expectations? “He's so handsome,” she said, “that it would have been OK, you know? I would have said, 'OK, yeah.'"

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Vergara was apparently very pleased with Manganiello’s engagement ring selection — so much so that she agreed to show it to the world using the E! News Mani Cam. “This is the love hand,” she exclaimed as she slipped her left hand in a tiny set that looks like a red carpet runway. E! News uses the box to get neat close-ups of celebrity jewelry and manicures.

The couple plans to marry later this year, possibly in the fall, and the Colombian-born beauty revealed that the wedding is going to be “big.”

“We started off with 20 and now there's like pages and pages,” she said.

Manganiello popped the question to Vergara on Christmas Day while they were vacationing in Hawaii. They had been dating for about six months at the time.

Photos: Courtesy of Getty Images; E! News screen grab.