Diamond Color,Cut,Clarity and Carat|Do You Know The 4C’s of a Diamond?

So you are ready to buy your first diamond or just want to upgrade to a bigger rock. You walk into your neighborhood jewelry store or are just browsing through the online jewelry sites, checking out the various diamond shapes and sizes available to you in your budget. You like a couple of pieces, but hang on what is all this talk about the 4 C’s? What exactly do they represent and why does the price differ so much even though the sizes of the two diamonds you like are almost the same.

These are some of the questions that arise when we are shopping as first time diamond buyers and sometimes even if it’s our fifth or tenth diamond purchase. Some of us are just too embarrassed to ask the jeweler to explain and even when explained these terms can quite vague to understand.

Why should you know these 4C’s? Well the short answer is that a diamond’s price is in direct proportion to them and the price of a diamond varies with the various combinations of these 4. Let’s take a look at the 4C’s individually and their implications on the price of the diamond that you want to buy. In this post I will talk about the 1st C which is the Color of diamond.

Color

The color of a diamond is its most characteristic feature and, equally constitutes one of its most important, for it’s the color which strikes the human eye most strongly. The color palette of diamond is very richly varied, it ranges from pink through red, blue, green, yellow, brown and even black and of course there is the colorless variety.

There are a lot of different diamond color grading systems but the most common and widely recognized system is that of the GIA (Gemological Institute of America).The GIA diamond grading scale is as follows:

A diamond is graded against a GIA certified Master Stone set. To the untrained eye distinguishing between colorless and near colorless diamond is very hard as is faint yellow to very light yellow. Colorless diamonds are the rarest, near colorless is next and so on.

As a buyer you need to be aware of these grading as the price can vary a lot between the different grades. Generally speaking I would suggest going for the near colorless grade ie. G-H-I-J as you can come across some reasonably priced diamonds in this range, of course the final price will be determined along with the other three C’s –clarity, cut and carat(weight) which I will discuss in the upcoming posts.

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