Every diamond has its own personality and characteristics, much like each of us. This can make choosing the best diamond a difficult decision, especially if you don’t know the basics. While there is always personal preference, design, and price to consider when choosing a gemstone, the best place to start is to develop an understanding of the 4Cs of diamond grading. Once you are informed, you can then apply your own eye for shape and details, letting your heart decide just which diamond is truly the one for you.

What are the 4Cs?

Many years ago, the diamond market was largely unregulated and there was no standard way of judging a diamond’s quality or setting its price. You might have heard generic, subjective terms like “cut well” or “cut poorly” when shopping for a diamond at your local jeweler. In the 1940s, this all changed when Robert M. Shipley, the founder of the Gemological Institute of America (GIA), coined the term “4Cs” to help gemology students remember the four factors that characterize a faceted diamond: cut, color, clarity, and carat weight. The concept was simple, but it changed the course of diamond history.

Today, this method of determining a diamond’s characteristics has become the universal standard. Not only does this allow the industry to communicate in a standardized language, but it allows you, the consumer, to understand exactly what you are buying.

Diamond Cut Grade

Cut is arguably the most important of the 4Cs, by any industry standard (and especially by us). The right cut not only unlocks a diamond’s beauty and sparkle but it can also hide inclusions, dim the appearance of color, and make a diamond seem larger than its carat weight to the naked eye. All of this while the wrong cut completely destroys a diamond’s appearance, making it look like a dull, lifeless rock.

Diamond cut is made up of many aspects, all of which add up to determine the final grade and beauty of each stone:

Polish: As a diamond is polished, it develops a mirror-like surface. The more accomplished the polisher, the more luminous the luster.

Symmetry: Both art and science, a diamond cutter must ensure that every facet of the diamond is perfectly aligned, mirroring and complementing its opposing facets. The more symmetrical the facets, the greater the sparkle.

Proportion: Proportion dictates how the diamond refracts light. A well-proportioned diamond exhibits fire, brilliance, and scintillation.

Brilliance: Brilliance is a technical term for the abundance and return of white light from a polished stone.

Fire: It is not just white light. Fire refers to how light splits into the spectral colors of the rainbow and moves within a diamond. Royal Asscher diamonds release the most incredible intensity of diamond fire based on industry-standard measurements.

Shape/Finish: The final product is the overall shape and arrangement of facets to create a diamond you fall in love with at first sight.

Here at Royal Asscher, diamond cutting is a calling nearly two centuries old. Since cutting our very first diamond in 1854, Royal Asscher’s impeccable reputation for cut craftsmanship has led to some of the finest, most revered diamonds in history. Every Royal Asscher diamond is cut beyond beauty, with
proportions that fall within strict parameters so that each facet is absolutely perfect. It is this standard, along with our proprietary, patented cut designs, that gives Royal Asscher Cut diamonds their unprecedented dispersion of color and light, setting them apart from the market.

Diamond Color Grade

While most people probably don’t think of diamonds as having any color, this is not the case. In fact, truly colorless diamonds are only the most rare of a wide range of diamond color grades. The official GIA diamond color scale was developed in the 1950s, to make sense of a market full of subjective terms that
were quite inconsistent. Because terms like “white”, “blue-white”, and “AAAA” already existed, the new color grade scale took on an alphabetical range, beginning with “D”, which is colorless, and ending with “Z”, which represents light yellow, brown, or gray.

Total, there are 23 letter grades on this scale, which are then divided into five subcategories: colorless (D-F), near-colorless (G-J), faint (K-M), very light (N-R), and light (S-Z). For the untrained, unaided eye, slight color distinctions are often not noticeable, yet they can have a significant effect on a diamond’s price.

Beyond the D-Z color scale, natural fancy color diamonds can be found that have deeper, more apparent body colors than “light”. These colors are a rainbow spectrum of hues including yellow, orange, pink, green, blue, gray, and even black. These remarkably rare and fascinating colors will often have secondary colors, which you will find listed as “light greenish-yellow” or “vivid orange-pink”, for instance. All diamond color, unless it has been created by laboratory treatments (which should always be disclosed), is caused by trace elements occurring during a diamond’s natural growing conditions deep within the Earth’s crust.

Royal Asscher diamonds are independently laboratory color-graded in perfect standardized lighting conditions. Our diamonds are either coloress (D/E/F) or near-colorless (G/H/I). If you are interested in a natural fancy color diamond, our Bespoke Diamond Service can help make your dream diamond a reality. Contact us at bespoke@asscher.nl.

Diamond Clarity Grade