A Guide to Diamond Quality v Size

Size isn’t everything, as the saying goes.

Diamonds are graded for quality by measuring several important factors.

You can find out more about this by reading our Woolfe guide to the 4 C’s of diamond grading, but the price of two diamonds of the same size will differ, depending on their quality. The higher the quality, the higher the price.

We appreciate that everyone has a budget and some people may be tempted to buy a bigger diamond of lower quality within that budget in order to offer something that looks more impressive. The problem is that a lower quality diamond is cheaper because it doesn’t look good: put simply, it lacks beauty, so it won’t put a smile on the face of the person who will wear it.

So there’s a balance to be drawn between quality and size. The diamond should be beautiful, so that it excites the wearer and it should be a large enough to please them.

We only sell white diamonds that actually look white and don’t have blemishes or inclusions that are visible to the human eye.

Diamonds are also graded to indicate how well they are cut. Only diamonds with excellent or very good cut, polish and symmetry grades have the desired eye-catching sparkle.

White diamond colour starts at D and goes down from there, but any diamond with a colour grade of D, E or F will look colourless to a human eye. There is no A, B or C in the colour grades of diamonds. D colour is more expensive than F colour, so an F colour diamond will be less expensive than the same size D colour diamond if all the other grading factors are the same. Furthermore, a diamond with a higher clarity grade will be more expensive than a diamond with a slightly lower clarity grade, but both may have no visible blemishes or inclusions.  Essentially, they will look the same although one will be more expensive than the other.

If you buy a round brilliant cut diamond with a clarity grade of VS2 or above it will have no visible blemishes. These are known as ‘eye clean’. The clarity grade SI1 is interesting because some SI1 clarity diamonds are eye clean and some are not. Typically the ones which are not eye clean are sold by larger jewellery companies with several branches and the eye clean ones are sold by smaller bespoke jewellery businesses because they have the time to buy these diamonds individually, they are not trying to buy large amounts of same size diamonds for mass production jewellery.

So, as you can see, the better diamonds may cost a little more, but they are so much more worthwhile. We take the time and trouble to make sure that the diamonds we sell offer the best possible combination of quality and size for the price.