Whiteflash-Diamond Playground

Somehow I get the feeling you won’t see hopeful brides asking for a 2ct. rough diamond in their engagement ring(s)…

This from the Wall Street Journal: 

“From Tiffany to De Beers, a new look in diamond jewelry is on the rise: uncut diamonds that to the untrained eye can look more like gravel than gems.

Known as rough diamonds, these are the stones in their natural state, before they’ve been cut with the facets that give diamonds the sparkle, brilliance and clarity they are known for. In colors from milky white to yellow, green and brown, the large, uneven stones often have a cloudy appearance.

At De Beers’s three U.S. stores, which started offering rough-diamond jewelry two years ago, one of every five pieces sold now features rough diamonds. A $45,000 rough-diamond necklace is displayed prominently in the window of the company’s Fifth Avenue store in New York. Meanwhile, Bergdorf Goodman added rough diamonds to its jewelry selection last September. Retail prices for rough-diamond jewelry vary considerably, from $600 for a small uncut diamond set in a stainless steel ring at De Beers to $750,000 one-of-a-kind necklace of pearls and rough diamonds by Frank Gehry at Tiffany.

But because some of the usual key standards for assessing a diamond’s value, such as cut and clarity, don’t apply to uncut stones, it can be tough for consumers to evaluate pricing. “It’s pretty much a blind purchase for consumers,” says Tom Moses, a senior vice president at Gemological Institute of America, which set the widely used “4C” standards (cut, color, carat and clarity) for cut diamonds. The institute doesn’t have a system for evaluating uncut diamonds.

Rough diamonds still represent only a tiny portion of the market for diamond jewelry. Last year, consumers around the world spent $68 billion on diamond jewelry, says Ken Gassman, president of the Jewelry Industry Research Institute. He estimates that sales of jewelry made with rough diamonds amounted to a few hundred million dollars at most.”