1. Imperfect and non-traditional diamonds are just as beautiful as perfect diamonds.
Snehal: “Flawless” means that to 10 times magnification a gemologist can’t see any inclusions at all, which is honestly overkill – it’s not going to affect the way the diamond looks on the finger. We don’t recommend D coloured or flawless diamonds to our clients as they just don’t represent value.
Eily O’Connell: The four C’s are just guides for traditional diamonds. People are buying more and more rough-cut diamonds, such as “peppered diamonds”, which are rings with diamonds that have black dots [pictured above]. It’s a matter of opinion. Champagne diamonds and cognac diamonds, which are also very on-trend right now, are brown variations of diamonds.
Kirsty Patterson: There are also Polki diamonds, which I sell a lot of – they’re uncut so they look very natural, and they don’t exactly sparkle in the traditional way, but to many people that’s part of their appeal.
2. The cut of the stone refers to how sparkly it is, but it can also refer to the shape.
DR: There are two different meanings to the word “cut”. One refers to the shape, e.g. Princess cut, Pear cut, whereas the other refers to the cut grade – how well the stone’s been manufactured from the rough crystal. The different names of the cuts just refer to the shape, i.e. a Pear cut diamond literally looks like a pear, with a sharp pointed top and a fuller rounded bottom, and a Princess cut is square-shaped. People are inventing new diamond cuts all the time and patenting them.
EO: It depends on your preference which one you choose. I find Pear cut is a beautiful slimming finger shape.
KP: It’s very subjective. The Princess and the Brilliant cut are more popular because of how sparkly they are, but I love the Emerald cut because it has a more subtle effect. When you cut a diamond you also end up with shavings, which are often what you see on Etsy. I use a lot of diamond shavings when I can because my jewellery is very delicate, so it lends to it. Everything gets used.
3. There are two kinds of colored diamond; dis-colored diamonds, which are cheaper, and rare “Fancy” diamonds.
KP: Some coloured diamonds, like grey, brown, and yellow, are more affordable, but ones like blue and red and pink are very, very rare and as such are prohibitively expensive.
DR: You get pale yellow discoloured diamonds that are essentially just bad white diamonds. Then you get the Fancy coloured diamonds, which are graded on a different colour scale to the white diamonds. These stones are expensive and desirable, rather than the discoloured white diamonds, which should be a lot cheaper.