| |
Couples diamondThe smart groom-to-be does his research before buying his fiancée a diamond ring! There are more styles and cuts to choose from than ever before. It's not enough to be educated about the four Cs of diamonds - cut, color, clarity and carats. Now there are all types of diamond cuts and settings to choose from.
The most popular style is still the round brilliant. It's one of
the earliest cuts ever developed and now relies on precise mathematical equations to create a stone with fire and brilliance that the earliest gem cutters could only have dreamed of.
But many brides want something completely unique. There are many traditional cuts to choose from. A pear-shaped is just that - wider at one end than the other. Or she can choose an oval, emerald or heart-shaped diamond. There are other cuts with unique faceting, such as the square princess-cut diamond.
Some cuts are patented, like the elongated Ashoka diamond or the Asprey & Garrard Eternal cut diamond. Other branded and patented cuts include:
Elara - a square-cut diamond with rounded corners
Asscher - a square diamond with rounded facets that gives an unusual complexity to the diamond
Couples diamond - this diamond is faceted to reveal either a circle of hearts or arrows inside. It's a truly unusual diamond that requires precise cutting for the image to appear properly.
The price of a diamond increases exponentially with its carat weight. A one-carat diamond costs much more than 10 10-point diamonds and a two-carat diamond costs more than twice as much as a one-carat diamond (given equal quality in other areas).
One way to enhance a ring is with embellishments such as baguettes or trillions. A baguette is a small emerald-shaped diamond that can be placed on either side of the main stones and a trillion is a triangle-shaped diamond that also is a good enhancement to the center stone.
How diamonds made
Diamonds form between 75-120 miles below the earth's surface. According to geologists the first delivery of diamonds was somewhere around 2.5 billion years ago and the most recent was 45 million years ago. The carbon that makes diamonds comes from...
Portuguese diamond
There's something so exciting about these incredibly large and perfect stones. Sometimes they have well-documented histories and we know where they came from and who owned them and when. But others have a past that's not as well-known, and that only...
Fire
The term fire is commonly used to describe a diamond, but what does it refer to? The ancient Greeks thought that fire in a diamond symbolized the eternal flame of love. Fire in a diamond is the dispersed light that appears as rainbow-like flashes of...
Napoleon Diamond Necklace
One of the most spectacular all-diamond pieces of jewelry in the Smithsonian Insitution is the Napoleon necklace. Thought to have originally been owned by Catherine the Great of Russia, it was presented by the Emperor Napoleon of France to his...
Heat conduction
meaning they reduce the flow of electricity. Blue diamonds owe their semi-conductive property to boron impurities, which act as a doping agent and cause p-type semiconductor behavior. Diamonds appear cold and hard, but they're good conductors of...
|
|
|
|
|
