The Problem With Fancy Colored Diamond Earrings

June 6th, 2012 by Noam Flint

Well, for you the customers there is hardly any problem with colored diamond earrings, this is just a catchy title, the problem is ours – the sellers.

As manufacturers we are often contacted for loose colored diamonds for various purposes, various jewelry designs. But believe it or not, the hardest request to fulfill is for diamond earrings.

Selecting Diamonds for Earrings

We will start the explanation by demonstrating with white colorless diamonds.
While most people think that it is all about carat weight and color (for example a set of G Color diamonds weighing 0.50 carat) the actual process of pickling a pair of matching diamonds is more complex. When we are looking for diamonds that are intended for earrings we check as many parameters as possible. We look at all proportions of the diamond, we consider the size of the diamond’s table and even how the light bounces of it. This is why when it comes to diamonds if you were to buy two diamonds (which are a matching pair) you would pay more while in most industries buying more than one item will get you a discount.

With that said – don’t worry – it is more than possible to find a beautiful matching pair.

Finding the Perfect Pair of Natural Colored Diamonds

Now that we’ve established that there is some difficulty with colorless diamonds let’s examine the real problem – a matching pair of natural colored diamonds.
The basics… Natural Fancy Colored Diamonds are by far more rare than colorless diamonds. The ratio between colored to colorless is about 1 to every 10,000 diamonds.

The next problem is the tremendous amount of official colors (I will explain the “official” part first). There are over 250 colors for colored diamonds. These colors are various combinations formed from the basic colors – red, brown, gray, green, pink, blue, orange, purple and yellow along with the different color intensities ranging from light to fancy light and up to the fancy vivid and intense. While there are colored diamonds with pure colors (for example – fancy yellow diamonds), the color of a colored diamond is often a combination of two or even three colors and the second and third colors are also graded for their intensity within the combination.

For example you have the popular fancy pinkish brown diamond (often referred to as champagne diamond) which is a brown diamond with a pinkish hue in it (slight amount of pink) and there is also fancy pink brown diamond which is a brown diamond with a more dominant tone of pink in it – a different colored diamond. The second is much more valuable since it is more pink.

Back to the “official” part of the colors… Even with GIA certified colored diamonds you will often find two colored diamonds with exactly the same color grading (“color description” attribute in the certificate) and they will look completely different.

So when the time comes to match a pair of natural colored diamonds it is a difficult task. So when you find such a pair, or better yet, get a set of colored diamonds earrings as a gift from your loved one – cherish it and enjoy it.