It’s time for the weekly diamond report. I’m going to just tell you a little story about a client that called me this week this is or actually emailed me.

This a dentist. He’s looking for diamond. He’s looking for a diamond in the neighborhood of two carats and sent me an email he said you know i just want you to use your expertise and i’d like you to find me a diamond that has all the different types of light return which is brilliance, scintillation and dispersion and looks really really nice and come up with some suggestions that i’d like it to be about two carats.

So I emailed him back and what I had to tell him people don’t understand that there is a huge range in prices and that a two carat diamond can cost anywhere from six thousand dollars on the low end for terrible quality on up to in this case sixty five thousand dollars and that’s the total range for a two carat diamond.

I said the first of all if you are shopping for a diamond you need to narrow it down and figure what do you want to see in a diamond and so the four characteristics that determine the quality and value of a diamond are cut, color, clarity, and carat weight.

So the clarity has to do with the numbe of imperfections in the diamond. Usually with clarity what people want to see is that they just don’t want to look at a diamond and see any real noticeable imperfections or inclusions in the stone. So as long as you stay with a stone that is going to be SI2 or better in some cases even a I1 clarity or better you should be fine with the clarity and every clarity grade you get better from SI2 the price goes up. So really you can’t tell visually the difference between an SI2 and VVS1 for example so a lot of people say hey I don’t really want to pay the money for a VVS1 if I can’t really see the difference.

With color in a diamond, diamonds are graded for color from D to Z with D being colorless and Z being light yellow. So for the color grades as long as you stay in a round brillant diamond I or better then you should be good for the color. Every color grade that you get better than I going in the direction of D which is the best you pay more money and a lot of people say if I can’t really tell a noticeable difference in the color as long as I don’t see yellow body color then I am going to be okay with that.

As far as the cut of the stone, cut is important. You want to have a diamond that has the correct angles and proportions so it takes light into the stone. Light is internally reflected and leaves the stone in that brillance that everyone likes to see. You also want a diamond that has the spread so it looks as a visual appearance of a stone that weighes what it does. You don’t want a stone that is cut too deeply. If cut too deeply the weight is going to go up and down the diameter will be smaller and the stone will look better.

So anyway I emailed him back and told him he needed to narrow it down as far as where he felt comfortable with color clarity assuming the cut is going to be good and his budget.

That is one story about one client this week and I am going to continue. I got a lot of ideas about things. I am going to try to do this on a weekly basis and give you the weekly diamond report. So there you have it. Thank You!