Where to start?
Read this guide before purchase to help you buy a better diamond for your money.
We recommend that you buy loose diamonds in order to examine the stone carefully before deciding upon the setting to put it in. The price of a loose diamond depends on a number of characteristic including the 4Cs: Cut, Carat, Clarity and Colour. We advise you to go beyond the 4Cs.
Take advantage of the knowledge and experience our specialists can offer, call us on 0207 242 2227 or visit our Hatton Garden showroom.
Cut
The cut determines the fire, brilliance (sparkle) and beauty of your stone. The angle and proportions have to be perfect for the diamond to show its full potential when reflecting light back to the eye. Shape is merely one aspect of cut.
Some shapes bring out more sparkle (the most popular being the round brilliant-cut diamond), but ultimately it’s the proportion, symmetry and finish of a diamond give the stone its brilliance.
Carat
Carat (ct) is the unit of weight for a diamond.
The weight of a diamond alone is an unreliable guide for value. A larger diamond with less clarity and a slight tint may be of less value than a smaller stone of higher quality.
Two diamonds of the same shape and cut from the same rough diamond (with equal carat weight, colour and clarity) can be different sizes depending on how well they have been proportioned.
The shape, cut and mount may affect the perceived size of a diamond making it appear larger than the carat weight may indicate.
Clarity
A diamond’s clarity is affected by any external irregularities and internal imperfections created by nature when the diamond was formed. Imperfections such as spots, bubbles or lines are called inclusions. Inclusions can interfere with the passage of light through the stone, diminishing the sparkle and value of the diamond.
Clarity is graded on a scale ranging from flawless (FL or IF) to imperfect (I). To be graded flawless, a diamond must have no inclusions visible to a trained eye under a 10x magnification in good light.
Colour
Truly colourless, icy-white diamonds are extremely rare and therefore more costly. Stones are graded by colour depending upon how far they deviate from icy-white using letters from the alphabet: D – Z (from colourless to yellow).
Those graded D-F are colourless and are more expensive due to their rarity, followed by G-H which are white and I-J which are slightly tinted.
It can be difficult to tell the difference between a diamond in the colourless range and the near colourless range using the naked eye. This is particularly true after the diamond has been set within a piece of jewellery.
