Oh hey, here's a picture of Jennifer Aniston rocking a zillion-carat engagement ring that her fiance, Justin Theroux, "gave" her. Though I assume Aniston bought the ring herself six years ago and stashed it in a safety deposit box until the day she finally found a man who could properly pull off being dressed like a 1930s fighter pilot. This is a big rock. A huge rock. A very expensive, obnoxious, stupid fucking rock.

When it comes to engagement rings, there is a fine threshold between beautiful and gaudy, and Aniston just hopped inside an IROC and made skid marks on that threshold. Take a look at Kim Kardashian's old rock and see if you disagree. It's just as tacky. When you wear a diamond that big, you're essentially announcing to everyone that A) You have no sense of subtlety when it comes to flaunting your wealth and B) You enjoy blinding small children. A ring that big tells people that you're willing to throw your spine out of alignment just so that people can see you toting a fucking crystalline boulder around on your hand.

Plenty of people have argued against the very notion of engagement rings. They're a needless expense, they come from African mining monopolies that fix prices and pay their workers in severed limbs, they exist strictly as a means of generating hateful envy amongst friends, canary diamonds look like they've been stained with urine, etc. But even if you're like me and you still see some value in the custom, there's nothing about a nine-pound engagement ring that makes sense. It's just a shitty way of trying to have your love upstage the love of other, poorer human beings. And it looks stupid, just like Super Bowl rings do. Accessories are attractive on people when some sense of proportion is involved. It's not simply about the ring, but its relationship to the finger it rests on. And having a diamond that is literally WIDER than your finger is like walking around with bedazzled balloon animal jammed between your tits.

It also perpetuates the idea that ALL women need big rings, which means some poor schmuck out there is gonna have to pony up an extra month's salary just because his ladyfriend saw this ring while reading US Weekly while changing tampons and just had to have Jen's ring. Get a smaller ring, people. Use the difference to make a car payment or feed an AIDS baby. You don't need a neutron star hanging off your body.

[People. Photo: Getty.]