When it comes to buying large diamonds, you should start the process as you would for all diamond purchases. While commercial grade diamonds over three carats are surprisingly rare, they do exist – and they can be a poor choice if you are unwise! However, wisdom is easily acquired and the following five tips for buying large diamonds will ensure that you get your money’s worth and end up with a simply beautiful large diamond to grace your jewelry collection! As always, we begin with the Four Cs – and add on another that should always be on your diamond shopping list!
Pick Your Shape
Choosing the shape of your diamond is not as simple a matter as just picking a shape that you like. There are a number of popular cuts, the top five of which are:
• Round Brilliant: the ‘traditional’ shape of a diamond, it has in fact only been so since the early 1900s! The design is mathematically calculated to channel light into the diamond and out through the table for maximum sparkle. It was an improvement on older designs which gave a similar shape, but with vastly fewer facets – the newly improved increased facet count enhances the sparkle exponentially.
• Princess Cut: this cut is square from the top and an inverted four-sided pyramid from any other angle. It is also a brilliant cut, with many facets, and like the round brilliant, is a deep cut which leads to the extra brilliance and shine.
• Emerald Cut: an emerald cut stone tends to be wide but shallow. It is a good cut for those who like diamonds but want gleam rather than scintillating sparkle. The shallow cut means that even the smallest diamond looks superb – and the bigger carat weights look positively enormous!
• Oval Cut: again, a deep, brilliant design, an oval diamond is ideal for an engagement ring as it makes the fingers look long and slim, adding elegance and sparkle at the same time!
• Marquise/ Pear Cut: marquise cut diamonds are based on the lips of Madame de Pompadour and were the brainchild of her lover, King Louis XV of France. They look a little like a football, to use a much less romantic simile, but are large and beautiful, with a wide face and plenty of sparkle. Pear-cut diamonds have one oval end and one marquise cut end, for a teardrop shape that is striking, attractive and surprisingly popular, despite being one of the oldest diamond shapes.
As you can see from this brief list, each shape has its own appeal, and you must decide which you like best before you start to look at possibles and begin to compare and contrast your favorites.
What Color?
Diamond color means lack of color usually! A high color-rated diamond will have no hint of any other color in it, meaning that the stone is pure carbon with no contamination from other elements occurring when the diamond was formed. There is a market for colored stones though, and the deepest colors are known as vivid fancies and vivid intense fancies. They tend to go in and out of fashion, so if you love vibrant colors, choose your vivid fancy stones when they are unpopular, to snap up a great diamond for a much lower price.
Clear As Can Be
The clarity of a diamond is to do with how many flaws or inclusions there are in the diamond. All natural diamonds will have some kind of inclusions. Stones are examined in laboratory conditions, under bright lights, with a white background and under a minimum of 10x magnification, and the flaws and inclusions are noted. Good stones are what is called ‘eye clear’ which means that the inclusions cannot be seen with the naked eye.
Weighty Matters
Only once you have settled the matters of cut, clarity and color should you decide on the size stone that you want. A smaller stone with high ratings on those three criteria will be considerably more expensive than a bigger one with low ratings for those factors. If you can find a five carat stone with good or high ratings on all other levels, you will have a very unusual stone on your hands – literally if it is going into a diamond engagement ring.
Certificate
The final C is that of certification. Only two labs should be used for true peace of mind: AGS and GIA. These two institutions certify all stones in the USA over a certain carat weight and quality, and no five carat diamond should be sold without one. Some bigger stones – such as those of five carats or more – have their certification number etched onto the girdle. You can input this number into the online certificate registry and see, at a glance, the ratings the diamond has received.
Now you have your very own Five Cs to help you navigate the process all you need to do is look here for your very own Whiteflash 5 carat diamond!
