All About Colored Diamonds

by Talia on March 15th, 2010

Essential Information For Choosing Colored Diamonds

Treating Diamond To Enhance Color

Lots of people are starting to favor the fancy, intense colored gemstones over the customary clear, or white, diamond. A number of precious gems are discovered in their organic colors when they are mined, others can be tinted by gemologists and jewelers during a treatment process. To be able to make them less expensive to the average buyer, specialists have started color treating diamonds of lesser grades in order to take a less appealing yellowish or brown colored diamond and turn it into a stunning, vibrant colored diamond.

Colored diamonds can be treated with a practice called irradiation, which uses a high heat program to change the color of a diamond. Some other diamonds are treated by simply painting.

The Natural Range of Fancy Color

Although precious gems will be inspected and valued according to their colorless qualities, there are still quite a few people who choose the flamboyant colored diamonds that appear in vibrant hues of greens, yellows, reddish, pink along with all the variants of colorings in between.

As mentioned previously, there are those stones with naturally occurring color. If a diamond has nitrogen in it, it often has a yellow tint to the stone. If the gemstone has been effected by radiation, the gem may turn green.

Other colored diamonds which have been treated to obtain their color allows people with lower budgets to purchase the fancy colored diamonds. Gemologists have found ways to alter the colors of diamonds to get any shade or hue desired.Grading colored gems is more complex than grading the clear variety due to the stacking of the color intensity.. The first part of the color grading process is the identifiaction of the primary color range, eg blue, pink etc.. Secondarily, the intensity of that particular color range is graded on a scale. The more intense the colorisation of a natural diamond, the more rare and thus more expensive it is valued to be. . A treated diamond will cost less than a naturally colored diamond in most instances.

Synthetic Diamonds

In general, most diamonds are found in the earth, in mines and extracted by miners , but more recently, scientists have come up with ways to create synthetic diamonds. A synthetic version is still a real diamond, just created in a lab instead of the earth, and, of course, are much less valuable.

Names of The Colors

Because fancy colored diamonds can be found in so many different shades, it can often be challenging to interpret the name of the diamonds color. You can quite regularly see a cross referencing of color such as a “greenish blue”. Each name has a primary color description, and some have a secondary color description. If another color is mentioned with an ‘ish’, that would be the secondary color. If you come upon a diamond labeled “brown red”, then the diamond will have equal amounts of both colors seen through the stone.

Recently It has become a very popular choice to buy yellow diamond engagement rings, from the range of canary yellow diamonds and other fancy yellow diamonds.

No comments yet

Leave a Reply

Note: XHTML is allowed. Your email address will never be published.

Subscribe to this comment feed via RSS