1 ct diamond ring

1 ct diamond ring

As a teenager, I loved  photography and over time I acquired some really decent photographic equipment. As you all know, other than natural earth mined diamonds, nothing last forever, so when digital photography with its fancy TFT screens, CCD chips, CF and CD cards hit the markets, the analogue photographic equipment just had to go.  I then started the incline toward digital. So in a nutshell, I had a good understanding of depth of field, aperture correction, shutter compensation and lenses etc, basically photography in general. Meanwhile, I've been a photo journalist for some time, but that was a really long time ago. 

My wife is a professional wedding photographer who has been plying her trade for more than 35  years.  As an electronics engineer, I really don't consider myself as a photographer, since I don't earn a living from photography like my wife does. I refer to myself as a "happy snapper" and most weekends I assist my wife as a backup wedding photographer, shooting cutaways.  So, what does photography got to do with diamonds you may ask. When Photographing Weddings you do get to see a whole lot of diamonds.

After having said all that, I must admit that between my wife and I, we've never ever seen 1kg of diamonds in toto.  We've done more than 1000 weddings and if we could hypothetically, collect all the natural earth mined diamonds perching on the rings of the brides and the occasional natural diamond embedded in the  rings of the grooms we've ever photographed, it would certainly weight less than a a litre of water, neither would all those little stones fill a litre bottle. 

I have yet to attend or photograph a wedding with a natural earth mined solitaire diamond bigger than 2.1ct because we've done one with a 2ct princess cut diamond ring. We've even done a wedding with a 5 ct ring but it wasn't a solitaire but rather a quad princess-cut diamond double frame bridal set. like the one below. Now that's a sparkly worth taking a photo of. Anyway weddings with diamond rings above 5 ct are rear but they do occur.

5ct quad princess-cut diamond double frame bridal set

Natural earth mined diamonds larger than 1 ct have a much higher value than smaller stones because they are found less frequently in nature. Meaning that the average wedding ring / engagement of the average couple, sports a single diamond of under half a carat which is physically about 4mm in diameter. In fact, most solitaire natural earth mined diamonds on most wedding / engagement rings range between .2ct and .5ct and are typically, 2mm to 4mm in diameter. (Diamond mm to ct Conversion Table) It takes 5 x 1ct natural earth mined diamonds to weigh 1 gram, so we are really talking negligible weight. There is a tendency in the jewelry market to make rings appear larger by clustering 7 x .20ct stones to form a halo ring. Or to use several smaller chips peppered on a 6mm setting and pass it off as a 1 ct ring. Tough the total diamond weight would equate to 1ct, its value is a far cry from a 1ct solitaire natural earth mined diamond. 

1 gr = 5.00ct
2 gr = 10.00ct
3 gr = 20.00ct
4 gm = 25.00ct
5 gm = 30.00ct

Anyway, can you just image the value? Pessimistically speaking, if we had to value said diamonds at $200 per carat (.2 g) then 5000 carats which would equate to 1 kilo which would be worth a $1,000,000. But, like I said pessimistically, because the grades of some diamonds are far greater than others. To mention an incident, a few years back, I'd  been to a jewelry auction where a single stone, 10ct diamond was sold off for as much as $125 0000; and according to some pundits, this was a real bargain.  Comparatively speaking, what this means is that the contents of the "1 liter bottle", with its tiny pebbles are almost worthless, because it represents the "chaff of the wheat" after the diamond sifting and sorting processes.

Chips, Mackle & Melee Diamonds - "offal" the entrails of the diamond trade

So if you were to buy a natural earth mined diamond, settle on a 1 carat for anything less is considered,  chips, mackle, melee diamonds, which are the names given to diamonds between .001 carats to 0.18 carats in weight. In one word, its  "offal", the entrails of the diamond trade that nobody really wants.

Natural earth mined diamond are real diamonds as opposed to the synthetic stuff they're selling at all jewelry stores and online. Stay away from lab diamonds, made made diamonds and cubic zirconia because  they have even less value than "offal."

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