Buying Diamonds: The Four C’s

The First Thing You Need to Know About Buying Diamonds

For life’s major milestones—from getting engaged to celebrating an anniversary, having a baby or graduating college—buying a diamond and designing a one-of-a-kind piece of jewelry is an incredibly special way to commemorate the occasion.

While there tends to be more work involved in designing a piece of jewelry (like an engagement ring), it has its own benefits. You get exactly what you want: your ideal size, shape, and combination of stone and metal. This can be the perfect solution for someone who has a specific vision of what they want.

Buying a loose stone is the first step of designing a piece of jewelry—and it’s the most important step in the process. The center stone will define the ring: everything else will follow. Before looking at stones, you need know what you should be looking for. Diamonds are evaluated by the four Cs, or the four qualities that determine a diamond’s appearance and value.

Cut

The cut refers to the reflective qualities of a diamond, not its shape. The reflective quality is determined by how well the stone is cut (its proportions). We source every diamond from skilled master cutters (eliminating the middleman and the markup), ensuring each stone is of the highest quality. Our diamonds must meet “perfection” or “premium” cuts.

Color

Color is the result of a diamond’s composition. Though many people think of diamonds as colorless, there are miniscule differences in shade—notes of yellow and brown—that determine a stone’s coloring, and give it a letter grade. Colorless diamonds are very rare. While the differences between grades are subtle (colorless to light yellow (D to Z on the color scale), at Hyde Park, we select diamonds in the colorless to the near colorless categories (D to J on the color scale). Note: Fancy colored diamonds do not follow this rule.

Clarity

No two diamonds are alike. They can have the same cut and color, yet appear different because of the clarity, which is determined by flaws or inclusions. The fewer the inclusions, the greater the clarity, and the more valuable the stone. At Hyde Park, we only select diamonds that are flawless to slightly included.

Carat

Size falls under the last “C,” though it’s often the characteristic people think of first. It’s certainly the most noticeable of all of the characteristics to the naked eye. Two diamonds of equal size can have wildly different values depending on cut, color, and clarity. As a diamond increases in size, it increases in rarity (large diamonds are found less frequently than small diamonds)—and price. One carat is equal to 200 milligrams.

Selecting a diamond is a careful balance of determining which characteristics are most important in relation to one another. The next step in understanding the qualities of a diamond is to start looking at stones side-by-side. Our trained Hyde Park Design Team is ready to help, and can even help you start thinking about all the ways you can set the stone to best show off its greatest characteristics.