All About Diamonds
In this article I will be talking all about diamonds and about how there is more to a girl's best friend then you may have at first realized!
There are five main areas that diamond experts discuss when they are talking all about diamonds, and they are as follows:
Cut
If you look at very old diamonds that have been set in jewelry, then often you can be impressed at their sheer size, but somehow
they will lack the sparkle that you have come to expect from a diamond.
This is because old diamonds were typically polished rather than cut, and because it is the cut that produces the refraction of light in a
diamond, they tend to look a little dull in comparison to modern diamonds.
There are five main cuts of diamond, and these are referred to as:
Excellent - Ideal - Very Good - Good - Fair.
On this five step scale you move from a diamond at "Fair" that still accounts for about a third of all diamonds that are cut,
where the light does not refract as well as it might, and it doesn't sparkle quite as much as it should.
Right up to an "Excellent" cut which is the fantastic sparkly diamonds that we think of when we see movie stars like Elizabeth Taylor
in old newsreels talking all about diamonds they own.
Typically, the deeper a diamond is cut, the more sparkly it will end up being.
Shape
There tend to be nine normal shapes that most diamonds will be cut too. These are:
Round, Emerald, Princess, Oval, Pear, Marquise, Radiant, Heart and Asscher.
Which of these you choose is very much a personal preference.
Clarity
A diamond is a stone, and so is subject to the vagaries of nature both in terms of how large it is, but also how pure it is.
In diamond circles the purer the diamond, and the less inclusions (marks that are visible to the eye in the heart of the diamond)
the more expensive the diamond will be.
At the top end of the scale are Flawless diamonds, which as the name suggests have no inclusions or flaws in them at all.
At the bottom end are "I1, I2, I3 Inclusion" diamonds which have blemishes that are rather obvious for all to see with a 10x magnifying glass.
Between those two ranges there are a number of other different classifications, though in practice you may need an expert
on hand who knows all about diamonds in order to tell the difference between them.
The reason that clarity is so important is because the clearer the stone, the more light it refracts, and the more sparkling it will be.
Color
The whiter and clearer a diamond is the more expensive it will be.
These range from a D-Colorless Diamond, through to a Z which is a light yellow color.
Above a Z then the diamond becomes a 'Fancy Yellow Diamond', and the deeper the color yellow it has then it once more becomes valuable.
Carat
This refers to the weight of the stone itself.
¾ carat diamonds are relatively common in jewelry, but as you go up the scale to larger stones like 2 or 3 carat diamonds then they become
much rarer.
When experts who know all about diamonds look at a stone then they are assessing these five main areas to assess its value.
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