Month: May 2013

How to Grade Clarity-Enhanced Diamonds

As more companies entered into this technology, known as fracture-filling, or clarity enhanced (CE), the door became wide-open for vendors to assign the clarity grade of their choosing. While we at Northwest Gemological Laboratory have…

Strain in Diamond

Recently an experienced bench jeweler and custom designer submitted a diamond to Gemworld for a damage report. The diamond had apparently developed an eye visible break in the crown during an otherwise routine retipping job…

Fancy Pink Diamonds

The natural fancy color diamond category has performed extraordinarily well during the past decade. Fancy colored diamond prices are driven by some of the same factors driving the strong interest in important collection grade natural…

The Black Gem Challenge

Black stones have been in vogue for some time even sold as loose stones on the TV or Internet. See figure 1. While originally these may have been black diamonds set in expensive jewelry, we…

Colored Stone Market

Business in the international gem market is reportedly way off this spring. Supply is tight in the high end goods and small scale investment in production is lagging. The excitement that colored stone dealers had…

Diamond Market

At the last DeBeers site in April, rough prices were increased by an average of 3%. Stones in the one to two carat range and above 5 carats had higher increases. Since boxes were already…