The 4C’s in Detail – Understanding Colour

Diamond Colour is about what you can’t see. Diamonds are graded by how closely they approach colourlessness – the lesser the colour, the higher the value of the diamond. This norm of course does not refer to fancy colour diamonds like pinks, blues, etc. This post will discuss the colour grading scale for regular white diamonds. Diamonds with lesser colour allow more light to pass through and therefore reflect light better. Truly colourless diamonds however are extremely rare. Most diamonds found in stores are colourless to near colourless with slight tints of yellow or brown. GIA’s colour grading scale is the industry standard for measuring colour of a diamond. The scale starts with D which is absolutely colourless and goes up all the way to Z with increasing presence of colour. The untrained eye however can see very little difference between the top 6 colours. Infact even a lab typically colour grades diamonds only by comparing them to stones of known colour under controlled lighting. The colour grading parameters & corresponding descriptions given by GIA are as follows. Lots of times customers have asked us “which colour is the best”. That really depends on you. However here are some tips

1. Colours D,E & F are obviously the best but they are also the most expensive . Choose these if you are typically the kind of person who wants the best for yourself
2. G & H on the other hand provide excellent value. Even GIA defines them as near colourles and the colour on a G & H coloured diamond are undecipherable to the naked eye
3. I,J,K are great if you are on a budget. K colour diamonds may have faint traces of yellow but if you are looking to set them in Yellow Gold, then no one can see the difference

Now you may ask “why does the GIA Colour Grading system” start at D and not at A as would be expected. The reason is this… Before GIA put together the current colour grading system, different jewellers were using different colour grading scales. These included alphabet (A,B and C), numeric (0,1,2,3, etc.), Roman (I, II, III) or even descriptions like “clear white”,”blue-white”, etc. This obviously resulted in a lot of inconsistency. When GIA created their colour grading scale, they wanted to start afresh and therefore they decided to start with “D” which did not have any association with premium colours in the previous grading scales. We’ll write subsequent posts explaining the other 3 C’s in details and also explaining the differences between each of the individual colour grades.