Diamonds: Truths you didnt know.

Jan 01, 2005 01:05


Two nights ago, while trying to sleep I decided to make an entry on this because
1. I want to educate as many people as I can in an interesting manner,
2. I would like people to get the best bang for their buck, be it a 0.2ct or a 2ct and
3. There are most probably people who think I am just a braggart and that I don't actually know much about them expensive pieces of carbon except that they're pretty.

I'll add stuff as I go along because I can't sit still long enough to think up everything and it's damn hard work to put all my knowledge into coherent thoughts anyway. Man, this is hard, like writing a damn report for school!!!! Kinda regretting starting this, but I shall persevere for the greater good (as if :) and to further my own diamond education. I am also trying to be as thorough & accurate as possible, but with anything, please by all means take things with a pinch of salt and do not take this entry for gospel. =S

1. Diamonds are not rare. If you think they are, pay attention to people around you, nowdays why does almost everyone have at least one miserable speck of the damn things. Even the 4 year old kid may have a 0.0001ct diamond or worst a bigger diamond than you have. I've taught one with real diamond earrings before, not bigger than my own though. =P
The diamond marketing people just want to continue the notion that they are, to sell more diamonds and of course make more money. There are now mines all over the world, besides Africa, the other main ones can be found in Australia, Canada and Russia.
Beware: There are some underhanded companies, like Gordon Max in Singapore, claiming their cubic zirconia's (CZ's) to be Russian diamonds.

2. Debeers did a DAMNED good job of convincing the world that love = diamonds. They used to have a strong foothold and full control over the market, they were infact a cartel, but with the new mines being owned by other companies, they have somewhat lost their foothold on the monopoly. But because none of them wants the price of diamonds to drop dramatically (to once again make the most money), they all unanimously agree to maintain and of course, increase the prices.

3. Cut is king and should be the most important C. The shape of a diamond is often refered to wrongly as cut by salespeople in the many chainstores. Cut has been relatively ignored by the mass-market for a long time and it's only now starting to have much more of a spotlight on and buzz around it, so much so that even GIA is finally revising and coming up with a cut grade on their certs. GIA certs currently don't list enough pertinent information about the proportions of a stone to allow one to make an accurate assesment on the cut quality. These are the minimum information needed, table, depth, girdle, crown & pavilion (in angles for better accuracy) and culet, of a diamond's proportions that will tell you if it's a good or bad cut. With this info, you can use this free tool to sieve through stones. This is a site that has a list of cut charts. This useful scope comes in handy especially if you are looking at a diamond without the benefit of the proportions.
You can have a bigger poorly-cut diamond that wont reflect light back to your eyes and costs much more or a smaller well-cut diamond that can look bigger, with better fire, scintillation and brilliance. Cut can also help mask colour and clarity, which means that you can afford to consider a much bigger well-cut lower clarity & colour diamond rather than a top colour & clarity poorly-cut one.

4. Carat refers to weightage and not size of diamonds. Therefore, asking how big a diamond is and being told the carat weight, is actually an oxymoron. 95% of the world's diamonds are cut too deep, resulting in them looking smaller than they should. Also cutters make more money by cutting deeper, heavier diamonds and often to get those magic numbers of 0.5, 1, 1.5 carat. The proper term to refer to the size of a diamond is actually, spread.

5. The Colour range starts from D; D-E-F is colourless, G-H-I-J is near colourless, from K onwards will normally have a rather noticeable tint of yellow. Diamonds of lower colour with fluorescence of a bluish tint (about 30% of diamonds) usually appear more colorless. With a well-cut stone, one can go as low as a J or even K colour diamond.
The terms for Clarity (normally graded by labs under 10x loupe); IF Internally flawless & Fl flawless, VVS1 & VVS2 very very slight inclusions, VS1 & VS2 very slight inclusions, SI1 & SI2 slightly included. This means that if you find a well-cut one, you can go as low as SI1 & SI2.

6. Hearts and arrows is nothing special and also a clever marketing ploy to once again charge more money! Although H&A's demonstrates a diamond has been given a better cut, not all H&A’s have optimum light return. So beware when shopping for the myriad choices of H&A's. All diamonds actually display some form of poorly defined hearts and arrows, its a character trait rather than a special phenomenom of round diamonds. Therefore it is possible, if one is properly educated, to find a H&A non-branded stone with kick-ass optics for much less than a heavily branded H&A stone like Destinee (an example of a good H&A available locally) but with 30-40% markup.
Beware: If the cutter inscribes H&A on the girdle, the lab cert will come back with "H&A" in the comments section. To the unwitting consumer it looks as though GIA or AGS has "awarded" an H&A grade when in fact they are only reporting the lettering they found inscribed.

7. Lab Certificates, which are the birth certificate of diamonds, are something I should also touch on. AGS certs list propotions but that also makes them the pricest certs on the market, then GIA is next. IGI and EGL certs are often shunned but this simple study shows you why you should look beyond the paper and buy the diamond for its quantifiable beauty which will correlate to the screaming numbers.
Beware: AGS has their AGS Ideal 000, supposed to signify an ideal cut D colour IF clarity (Internally flawless) diamond, but the modern version of AGS000 just means ideal cut/ excellent symmetry & polish but not all are throughly well-cut.

8. I especially dislike local retail jewelery chain-stores like Lee Hwa, Tian Po, Poh Heng and Goldheart because they charge ridiculous amounts for normal jewelery and especially the better cut branded stones. I don't mind Soo Kee/ SK for their fun stuff & reasonably priced H&A below 0.25ct and Taka Jewelery for their selection of reasonably priced loose certified H&A and normal stones (once again, you have to know what you're looking at). Tiffany is the upmarket store that I dislike the most, mainly because they bank on their brand name to sell normal to average diamonds for exorbitant amounts, the stones are cut to their own in-house standards. If you think you want the damn blue box so much, I can buy a million for you off Ebay. A little known fact, Tiffany is a brand name retail outlet much like an upmarket jewelery-selling version of 7-11, except they slap their name on an item and charge you their 40%-50% mark-up. Their diamonds come from the very same mines that others come from, their designs are "special", but come from outside sources (think of the Elsa Peretti line), and even those can be closely copied by a skilled craftsman. If you want to buy their normal stuff, go ahead, but please you would be doing your man and yourself a great disservice by buying their diamond rings. Think of the bigger stone you could get, the future accommodation you'd need to buy or the nicer furniture for said accomodation, from the money saved. Of course, all this would be irrelavant if you were a bazillionaire or someone who has done all the research but still feels that "Tiffany's-or-bust". I don't mention the other hi-end brands because they actually have their own in-house team of designers, jewelers and such, whereas as far as I know, Tiffany's farms out alot of the work. Lazare diamonds used to be good when they first came out but since then because Lazare Kaplan has not kept up with the latest diamond cutting technology, their stones pale in comparison to the latest H&A diamonds.
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