By Rose Mueller GG CGA
In "Diamond's Are Forever" James Bond is asked whether he knew as much about diamonds as he did everything else. He replied, "They are hard, they scratch glass and they replaced the dog as a girl's best friend." He proceeded to learn more, as will we.
Diamonds form 75-120 miles below the earth's surface under conditions of intense heat and pressure. They were brought to the earth's surface as a result of volcanic activity. They are found in dikes.
Diamond is unique in many ways. It is the only gemstone comprised of a single element, Carbon. It is the hardest of all gemstones. There is a difference between hardness and toughness. Hardness is a stone's resistance to scratching, toughness the resistance to breakage. According to Mohs scale of hardness, diamond is a 10. Diamond is one of the most refractive of gemstones. This is the ability to bend light for brilliance.
The definition of a gemstone is that it is rare and beautiful. We know diamond can be beautiful, but is it rare? There are billions of people, but how many Sofia Lorens or Gary Grants are there? To produce 1.00 carat of diamond a mine processes 5 tons of diamond bearing ore. Of these carats only ¼ are classified as gem material. A diamond cutter loses another 50% of the diamond rough in fashioning the gemstone.
Between 400 BC - 1725 AD, India was THE source for diamonds. The Indian Moguls amassed the greatest treasure trove of precious gems, including Persian pearls, Burmese rubies and sapphires and Columbian emeralds. It is called the "Golden age of precious stone accumulation". The Moguls most coveted the crystal octahedral, the rough uncut diamond of perfect color and clarity. China, Greece, Rome were left with off colored stones of lower quality. The Indians by the 4th century used grading scales for color, clarity and shape. Only the mine owners and rulers had diamonds. There are no records for the number of diamonds produced, their sizes or colors. How do we know about India's illustrious diamond history? Jean Baptiste Tavernier lived between 1607-1689. He is the Marco Polo of gemstones.He made seven voyages to the near East. He studied and wrote about the diamondhistory in India. Tavernier worked for the Sun King, Louis XIV of France. Hisrecords include the finest and most complete drawings of the shapes and cuts of Indian diamonds and gemstones..
Europe slowly emerged as the center for gemstones and jewelry. As early as the 7th century, Paris became the hub forfine jewelry, eventually producing many of the world's greatest designers and manufacturers. The jewelry was only for the rulers and the clergy. Venice became the cutting center for diamonds by the 14th century. Having no saw to cut diamond limited the quality of cutting and the amount of the production. The Renaissance brought industrial and cultural changes. The world became larger. Diamond was discovered in Brazil. As the diamond fields in India were depleted, Brazil filled the void during the 18th and 19th centuries. The Industrial Revolution brought the cutting saw. Amsterdam became the new cutting center and for the first time the commoner had diamonds and jewelry.
In 1867, diamond was discovered in South Africa. Cecil Rhodes formed DeBeers to control their distribution. By the 20th century, its CSO or Central Selling Organization shouldered this responsibility. The CSO holds sights, by invitation only. Every five weeks, 160 dealers and cutters are allotted parcels of rough diamond. NO requests are granted. The grades and shapes of rough are given to specific dealers and areas. The largest and best diamonds are cut in New York, the poorest and smallest in Bombay. Contrary to popular thought, South Africa isn't the primary producer of diamond. Zaire, Russia and Australia surpass its production.
Diamond is the only gemstone to occur in all eleven-color families: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, and brown, gray, black and white. Of 100,000 cut carats of diamond less than 10,000 carats will be white and of these less than 1,000 carats will be saturated enough to be called fancy color. 90% of the diamonds cut each year are off color to a degree. These 90% will have percentages of yellow, brown or gray body color. Color has three elements: Hue Tone and Saturation. The hue is the body color or spectral color as red or yellow. The hue can have a modifying color as purplish red. The tone is the light to dark of the color. The scale is 0 or white to 10 or black. Have you heard someone say that his or her sapphire is so dark it looks black? That is the tone. The saturation is the amount of color, the intensity.
The white diamond is basically pure carbon. The addition of boron atoms to the carbon produces blue diamonds, nitrogen atoms the yellow. Defects in the atom's lattice structures produce red, pink, orange, and green diamonds. The green, brown and pink colors are thought to occur after the diamond is formed. There is no positive test to determine the natural color origin of the green diamond. The black diamond is full of fissures containing sulfides. The premier grading laboratory, the Gemological Institute of America, has never graded a true red. There are only nine diamonds that are recorded purplish red. Of these, one, weighing 0.95 cts, from an estate in Billings, MT sold for one million dollars a carat. Of ninety million carats a year, probably none will be this color. It is believed that Tavernier brought out of India the blue diamond that became the Hope. India also produced most of the brown and large, pastel pinks. South Africa gave the world the yellows, including the infamous "Eureka" found in 1867. This is the first recorded diamond found in South Africa. It is a prized DeBeer's possession. Brazil produced the green and Borneo the purplish red.
In 1979, an important discovery occurred in Australia. It was the Kimberley diamond deposit in a remote region of Western Australia. This became known as the Argyle deposit. Interestingly, these diamonds are found in lamproite ore instead of the usual kimberlite ore. This deposit is rich, making the Argyle mine one of the foremost diamond producing mines in the world. The company uses both open pit and alluvial mining techniques to recover the diamonds. One of the most important bonuses with this discovery is the Argyle pink diamonds. Only a part of 1% of the total production is pink diamond. The colors range from light rose to full bodies purple reds.
Because there too few fancy colored diamonds, no cartel controls that market. The Blue Hope, The Dresden Green, the Yellow Eureka, the Agra Pink are names of famous, natural color diamond
Be aware that not all colored diamondsnare natural color. There are fancy colored diamonds produces by irradiation and heat treatment. In 1905, William Crookes irradiated diamonds that were radioactive. In 1945, J. M. Cork used the cyclotron, which is safe and still used today.
What better than the brilliance and hardness of a diamond captured in color?
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