Best Ways to Evaluate Diamonds and Diamond Jewelry

Start with the Four C’s

You’ve probably already heard about the Four C’s: color, clarity, cut, and carat weight, characteristics that contribute to a diamond’s beauty and value. The Four C’s are like a diamond cookie–all ingredients are important, but they all support each other. You’ll learn how to change the ingredients to come up with the “best” diamond.

Diamond Color

You might be surprised to learn that most diamonds are not truly colorless. How To Evaluate Diamond Color explains the GIA’s diamond grading scale and helps you select a color grade for your diamond engagement ring.Fluorescence is a characteristic that makes some diamonds appear to change color when they are exposed to ultraviolet light. Learn How Fluorescence Affects Color so that you aren’t surprised when she wears her diamond in different lighting situations.

Some diamonds are treated to improve their color–and some treatments aren’t permanent. Diamond Color Treatments provides the details.

Buying a Fancy Color Diamond helps you choose a vividly colored gemstone.

Get started by exploring The Four C’s: color, clarity, cut, and carat weight, characteristics that contribute to a diamond’s beauty and value.

Diamond Clarity Basics

Diamond Clarity

Clarity is a term that’s used to describe the clearness of a diamond. A perfect diamond with perfect clarity is rare, and most flaws that exist in jewelry grade diamonds cannot be seen without looking at them through a jeweler’s magnifying loupe.

It’s important to understand diamond clarity before you shop for an engagement ring, so that you can make sense of the jeweler’s explanations–and so that you don’t get too exited about the word flaws or other terms used to describe the tiny imperfections in diamonds.

How to Judge Diamond Clarity gives you an overview of the clarity grades you’ll encounter when you shop for diamonds.

Facts About Diamond Inclusions goes into more detail about the imperfections found inside of diamonds.

How Diamond Surface Blemishes Affect Clarity explains inclusions on the surface of a diamond.

This information about Using a Jewelry Loupe helps you take a close up look.

Has Your Diamond Been Clarity Enhanced? gives you the heads up about common treatments to improve diamond clarity. Some are permanent, some are not, so it’s essential that you know exactly what’s been done to a diamond before you buy it.

Diamond Carat Weight

Carat weight is expressed in different ways, as the weight of one diamond or several, and as “points” for smaller diamonds.

Facts About Diamond Carat Weight familiarizes you with diamond weight labeling, to help you understand what you are buying.

About Diamond Cut

Diamond Cut

The term diamond cut does not refer to a diamond’s shape. It describes the diamond’s proportions, such as its depth and width and the uniformity of its facets–all characteristics that control brilliance, durability and other features we look for in a quality diamond.

A good cut is essential to a diamond’s beauty. If the cut is of poor proportions, even a diamond with outstanding color and clarity will not display the sparkle that diamonds are famous for, because the gemstone’s components cannot interact with light as they should.

Diamond Cut Basics gives you a background in the characteristics that make up a quality cut diamond.

The Gemological Institute of America puts diamond cuts into three basic categories, and when you break it down like that, cut really isn’t confusing at all. Here’s a look at popular cutting styles you’ll encounter when you shop for a diamond.

More About Diamonds

• Laser Inscription is a technique used to inscribe a message on a diamond.
• Help End Conflict Diamond Trade describes steps you can take to buy a diamond that did not originate in a troubled conflict zone.
• Our Diamond Library offers advice on more diamond selection topics.