Beyond a diamond’s GIA report

So, you’ve been looking at a few diamond options and you’re almost ready to select one. Before you do, consider a few additional checks that we do on all our diamonds before we recommend them to our customers:

A VS2 clarity grade diamond with carbon inclusions

GIA reports do not indicate if the inclusions in your diamond are 100% eye-clean or not. Below is an example of a VS2 diamond with carbon inclusions. While this diamond clarity of VS2 is within our recommended range, the black inclusions are visible to the naked eye. For this reason, we manually check diamonds customers inquire about to ensure they are eye-clean and we will always recommend an eye-clean alternative if needed.

Bow-ties

Oval cut diamonds often have a dark area in the centre, as shown below. This is where light cannot be reflected so the diamond reflects shadows, typically in the shape of the bow-tie.

We always inspect our oval diamonds to ensure they have bow-ties of minimal visibility.

A diamond with a brown overtone

While diamonds can be graded colourless (D-F) or near-colourless (G-I), some may carry a brown-coloured or green-coloured overtone, or a milkiness which can affect its lustre.

Below is an example of a ‘brown overtone’ diamond with a GIA colour grade of ‘I’. While its colour grade falls within our recommended guidelines, we would not consider this diamond due to its overtone.

The details of a diamond’s overtones are not graded by the GIA, so we manually inspect every one of our diamonds to ensure there is no overtone.