12/21/11

Demystifying Fine Jewelry Information : The 4 C's Simplified

By Teri Delmonico


Learning about diamonds can be confusing for consumers new to jewelry shopping. A helpful way to learn the basics is this guide to the basics of diamond quality.

Crucial information makes these pages worth a look for more experienced shoppers as well. Most retailers will have a good quality page of this type, and it's a good idea to check it out to learn all about the 4 Cs, just to brush up on the differences between diamond clarity grades, and see what diamond-related knowledge they bring to the table.

Diamonds have many particular characteristics that make them special; in addition to their unusual beauty, diamonds are the hardest naturally-occurring material on Earth.

Cut is the most important of these factors, as proper cutting of a diamond is essential in bringing out the sparkle and fire that made this gem famous. Cut is often confused with shape, the form into which the diamond is cut.

The next, color, is one of the more detectable features of diamonds for non-jewelers to observe, although it is difficult for even the most skilled eye to distinguish between loose diamonds fewer than two color grades apart, or three grades apart for a stone that has been set. This is why diamond colors are often given as ranges.

The next of the four Cs is clarity, which is the evaluation of a diamond's internal and external flaws. Generally speaking, flaws inside a stone are called inclusions while flaws on the surface are known as blemishes. However, for the purposes of grading, gemological labs refer to all diamond flaws as inclusions.

Carat weight, the last of the four Cs and the trait that almost anyone can spot immediately, is the unit of measure applied to diamonds and other gems. While searching for the right piece of diamond jewelry, you may have noticed that pricing for diamonds of comparable cut, color and clarity grades increases exponentially rather than proportionally with the carat weight of the diamond. This is because finding large, good quality diamonds is less likely than finding small diamonds suitable for jewelry, or large diamonds that need bad areas cut away to form multiple smaller gems, so the value of a gem increases as the supply of gems like it decreases.




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