The upgrade problem
Search for a 10 year anniversary ring and the dominant suggestion is to replace the centre stone with a larger one. It is a good business for the people suggesting it.
It is also a strange proposition when you look at it directly. The original ring was bought at a particular moment, usually with less money than you have now, and often with more nerve than sense. Swapping out its stone treats the first decade as a draft. A great many people do it and are perfectly happy. A great many others do it and quietly miss the original.
Worth separating two motives before deciding. Wanting something new to mark ten years is one thing. Being dissatisfied with the original ring is another. The second is a legitimate reason to change it; the first is not, and there are better ways to serve it.
Adding rather than replacing
The most common answer is a second ring worn alongside the first. It marks the occasion without editing the record.
Practically it is also the more forgiving route. A new band can be designed to nest against the existing ring, which is a real design exercise rather than an assumption — the entry on bands that do not sit flush explains why a straight band so rarely nests by accident.
The added ring also does not have to be plain. It can carry stones of its own — a cluster holding a small stone for each member of the family as it stands now, which at ten years is usually a different list than it was at the wedding. Each sample is collected and sealed separately, so a family cluster is not one commission with several names attached to it. It is several documented samples, each traceable to the stone it went into. The children have haircuts anyway, and so does the dog.
The two-stone version, where one stone comes from each of you, is a different case and gets its own section below.
Eternity bands are the traditional choice here and carry one warning worth repeating: a band with stones set all the way round usually cannot be resized. Over a decade hands change. Something to raise before it is made rather than after.
Moving the original stone
An underrated option. The stone stays, the setting changes.
Ten years of daily wear means the setting is the part that has aged — claws wear thin, metal thins, and a ring that is looking tired is usually looking tired around the stone rather than at it. Re-setting keeps the object that mattered and renews the part that was always consumable.
It also allows a change of mind about height or metal, which people often have by year ten, without discarding anything. The original setting can be kept.
A right-hand ring, for the person rather than the marriage
Ten years is also a decade of your own life, not only a decade of a marriage, and the two are not the same thing even when they are going well.
A piece worn on the other hand, chosen by the person wearing it, marks something the wedding ring does not. The entry on buying for yourself makes that argument at length, and it applies with particular force to a milestone everyone else is describing in terms of the couple.
The thing that was not available at the wedding
Now the option specific to us, and the reason this milestone suits it better than the original one did.
A two-stone ring grown from both partners' carbon requires a sample from each of them. At a proposal that is usually impossible, because a surprise cannot involve asking someone for a lock of their hair. The constraint rules it out at exactly the moment most people would want it.
At ten years there is no surprise to protect. Both of you can go and have a haircut. Two samples, each sealed at collection into its own coded capsule and documented separately, become two stones set in one ring — which is what Union is, and what the two-stone form was made for.
It is a different kind of object from an upgrade. Not a better version of what you were given, but the first piece the two of you had made together, at a point where you had both already turned out to be who you were going to be.
What is honestly true about it
The stones carry no DNA. A fraction of each stone comes from the sample and the remainder is pure carbon. Both of those sentences appear on every page here, and they are the two things this category most often overstates.
What the documentation records is which sample, from whom, on what date, and which stone it went into. That is the part that cannot be bought later, and it is the reason the date matters.
Where to start
If the original ring is staying as it is, the question is what sits next to it, and that is a design conversation that should begin with the ring in hand rather than photographs of it.
If you are considering the two-stone version, the only prerequisite is that you both know about it. Tell us the date you are marking, and we will tell you honestly what is achievable before it.