Purchasing Diamond Rings is a daunting task for the novice shopper. There is much to learn and consider when comparing stones and making selections. Four characteristics are used to evaluate stones, cut, color, clarity, and carat weight. Cut is the most important, and the hardest to understand.
Getting educated about diamonds allows you to converse intelligently with salespeople about the stones. Most stores will help you understand the basics, but it is better to have some fundamental understanding beforehand.
Cut can refer to shape, round, marquise, oval, etc., but more than that, the way the rough stone was cut determines how much fire or brilliance it has. The quality of work will determine the gem’s proportions, how its angles and facets relate to each other. The precision of the work will be seen in its symmetry. The quality of a gem’s surface or finish let light through. All these, when done right, will bring out the maximum sparkle of that particular stone.
These gems are nature’s hardest material, four times as hard as the next hardest mineral. They are also brittle. Cutting is preceded by careful analysis and decision making. The stones have four directions of cleavage. Choosing the optimal cutting directions will depend upon crystal orientation. Inclusions or other flaws are best removed or hidden during the cutting, if possible without loosing too much of the stone size, or carat weight.
If the gem is well cut, light will enter through the table, the top flat plane of a stone and travel to the pavilion, the sloping bottom surfaces, where it is reflected across to the other side and again back out through the table. A poorly cut diamond will allow light entering to reach the facets and then leak out from the sides or bottom.
A visual inspection of a stone, through a jeweler’s lupe, can tell a lot about the quality of cut. Look to see whether the reflected light appears to be dispersed uniformly across the entire stone. See if the table is centered symmetrically in the stone and its edges meet at sharp points. Look at the culet, or point at the bottom and see if it is a small, centered flat polished surface without chips.
Then see if the sides of the square are straight, or if they bend in or out. The square is found by imagining that the the edges of the octagonal table project outward to the points of the facets that project away from that table. It may take a while for you to see this the first time, but if you will find an image of a diamond and study it a while, you will readily see these lines.
These lines indicate the proportion of table diameter to the stone diameter. If they bend in, the table proportion is smaller, giving more fire, or rainbow color effect. If they are straight, there will be more brilliant white light. When they bow out table proportion is too large, and cut is not ideal. These types of inspections and rules of proportion are good indicators of cut quality in Diamond Rings.