To answer both those questions we first have to look at what diamond clarity means. I’ve been buying diamond jewelry gifts for a long time and I once had the good fortune to have a friendly jeweler show me a “diamond in the rough.”

As you know, the diamond you see in the jewelry counter started its life as an undistinguished looking natural stone. Natural products have imperfections and diamonds are no exception. Considering their ultimate value it is no surprise that diamond cutters do not simply discard stones with imperfections. So most of the diamonds you see in the store or on the net have flaws of varying degrees of severity in them.

These imperfections or inclusions as they are referred to in the diamond business, include little cracks and fissures and spots of white or black where some foreign material has crept into the stone.

Back when I started buying diamonds there was no technology available to improve some of these imperfections, but starting about 20 years ago some techniques for enhancing the clarity of diamonds popped up in the marketplace. Here are the three major technologies in use today:

1. Fracture Filling
2. Laser Drilling
3. Deep Boiling

Fracture filling, as its name implies, is simply the process of filling a fracture in the stone with a silicone compound material which becomes invisible when it dries. For some stones, specialized drilling is needed to be able to reach the fracture in order to fill it with the silicone. As a bit of useless trivia, you might want to know the procedure was invented by an Israeli named Zvi Yehuda. You can buy Yehuda enhanced diamonds over the Internet.

Laser Drilling is used to rid diamonds of black spots beneath surface of the diamond. A laser beam cuts a passage to the spot which is then removed through a deep boiling process.

Deep Boiling can only be used for black spots at the surface of the stone. All that’s involved here is placing the stone in a pressurized acid bath which removes the spot. Obviously, if the spot can’t be reached, there is no point in deep boiling.

Now here are a few more things you need to know about clarity enhanced diamonds before we address the question of whether or not you should even consider buying one.

First, diamond dealers are supposed to disclose the fact that the diamond you are buying has had its clarity enhanced. It should come as no surprise that not all of them do. Drilling techniques leave some tell tale marks that can be detected through magnification, although not very easily by the untrained eye. You’re better off thoroughly researching the reputation of the dealer from whom you are buying.

Second, the GIA does not sanction any drilling techniques, so you can forget about getting a certificate with a diamond enhanced in this way. They do recognize deep boiling, as it really does nothing to the internal integrity of the stone itself. In fact, the procedure can be so effective, some dealers use deep boiling on all their stones, just as a precaution.

Okay, now for the question that matters: should you consider buying one? The answer is a qualified yes. If you haven’t already figured out that clarity is the least important characteristic of a good diamond, trust me when I tell you that it is. Spend the time investigating the way imperfections are graded and you’ll learn that the vast majority of them are not visible to the naked eye. So if you can’t see them, what does it matter?

The naked eye is the best judge of what you really want out of a diamond – its beauty. You can save a lot of money buying lower clarity grade diamonds with imperceptible imperfections and you can save even more buying a good looking clarity enhanced diamond.

How about those qualifications? If you are foolish enough to believe diamonds are a good investment, forget about clarity enhanced diamonds since you won’t be able to get a GIA certificate.

The final qualification has to do with whether or not bragging to your friends and family about the fact you can afford a certified diamond. If that’s important to you, forget about clarity enhanced stones. If however, you like to brag about how much money you saved on a diamond that still looks positively fantastic, clarity enhanced stones may be just what you want.

I have bought more diamond jewelry gifts over the years than I care to remember and my wife loves to display as many of them as she can whenever we go out. In all humility, friends and neighbors recognize me as the old man to talk to if you want to learn what you really need to know about diamonds. I started buying before there was an Internet and I have kept up with the times by learning all I can about buying diamonds over the net as well.

So I was eager to give advice to the young newlywed who just moved in and asked for advice about an elegant diamond as a gift for their first wedding anniversary. I was somewhat bemused as he shyly stuttered out that he really couldn’t afford the 2.5 Carat diamond he thought his bride wanted. He was certain that carat weight was what he needed to impress his lady and her friends and family.

When I asked him why the Carat weight was so important for him, he replied “Well the bigger the better.” It’s certainly true that when it comes to diamonds, size does matter. How many times have you heard the phrase “Look at the size of that rock” in response to some young lady displaying her engagement ring to friends and family? That line is all over the movies and Television and you may have heard it in real life as well.

The truth is, I told him, the Carat weight of a diamond doesn’t really matter that much, especially when it comes to size. Carat measures the weight of the stone, not its size. I first learned this years ago when a wizened old jeweler showed me two different diamonds and asked which was bigger. Much to my amazement, the lower carat weight stone was cut differently which made it appear to my eye to be actually larger than the higher carat weight stone.

How could this possibly be? The size of a diamond is proportional to its carat weight and increases in weight do not produce precisely matching increases in the diameter of the stone. I learned right then and there that carat weight wasn’t as important as most people crack it up to be.

I told the young man he would be better off saving some money and concentrating on the surface diameter of the stone – which gives the perception of size – and how well it is cut – which gives the stone its dazzling brilliance. I then explained the remaining determinants of the quality of a diamond beyond carat and cut, which, as you know if you’ve been doing homework on the ins and outs of diamond shopping, are clarity and color.

What’s really important when buying diamonds is what your eye sees. It can see brilliance and it can see size. With very inexpensive diamonds, it can also see flaws. In some diamonds it can detect slight yellowish color, which is not desirable. What it can’t see is weight.

However, although grateful for the advice, my young friend just couldn’t let go of the allure or a large carat diamond. Apparently he had grown up hearing squeals of delight from the women in his family announcing the carat weight of the stone in the gift they had just received. So for him, the desired status appeal and emotional response to the gift was dictated by its carat weight and little else.

I then fired my final bullet. I shared with him a secret I learned years and years ago about dealing with the status issue when it comes to diamond gifts. The secret is simple. Say nothing about the carat weight or the price of the diamond or where you bought it.

In most cases, a simple devilish smile will suffice. Silence with a smile gives the impression you paid more for the stone than you are willing to admit. Or that it weighs far more than you might expect. Or that you bought it from the most expensive jewelry shop in the area, not over the Internet! The only way your friends will know the carat weight of the stone or its price or where you bought is if you tell them. So don’t!

When I began I didn’t have the Interment to use as an information resource but you do. I hope you’ve spent some time learning about diamonds. If you have, you know that color is one of the four C’s that go into evaluating diamond quality.

The other three C’s are:
Cut
Clarity
Carat

The other thing you should know about diamonds is that they come in different shapes. And some say shape impacts color. Here are the 10 major shapes of diamonds available in the market today:

Round
Oval
Pear
Marquis
Heart
Square
Cushion
Princess
Emerald
Radiant

I was surprised when I first learned the best diamond color is no color, or colorless as it is known in the diamond world. Diamond colors are graded by experts from the GIA (Gemological Institute of America) into different grade categories, including colorless, nearly colorless, faint yellow, very light yellow and light yellow. Within each category there are letter grades starting at a D grade colorless (the best) all the way to a Z grade light yellow. Wow, that’s a lot to sort through.

So why should you care. It’s all about the light. We have all been dazzled by diamonds and that dazzle comes from light entering the diamond, bouncing around the cuts, and reflecting back out. The less color, the more light gets into the diamond. It’s just that simple. At some point, the hint of color in a diamond begins to block light and you get less dazzle.

Here’s another reason to care. It’s also about the money. The better the color grade, the more you pay for the diamond. D, E, and F are the grades for Colorless diamonds; and G, H, I, and J are the grades for Near Colorless diamonds.

The first question that popped into my mind when I first learned of those grades was can you really tell the difference between a D and a G? I knew you’d pay a lot more for a grade D but was it worth the price?

The answer the high end jewelry retailers don’t want you to know is: “no, to the untrained eye the difference is not discernible.”

If you doubt that consider how they are actually graded. A gemologist from the GIA places a stone on a solid white background and then compares it against a stone considered by some other experts to be representative of the grade. Nobody walks around wearing diamonds against white backgrounds with graded diamonds next to them for comparison, so how can they possibly detect the differences?

What you need to realize is that the ultimate judge of diamond quality is the eye of the beholder. If you can’t tell the difference between a D grade and a cheaper graded diamond, why waste your money?

If you still aren’t convinced, spend some more time on the net and you’ll find experts out there who tell us shape also impacts the perception of diamond color. So depending on the shape, we are told, you could go to a graded diamond as low as an M and the diamond would still dazzle you with its brilliance.

There is one final consideration when it comes to saving money on diamond color I want to share with you – fluorescence.

Fluorescence is a complicated concept describing how diamonds respond to some exposure to UV (Ultra Violet) light. GIA studies have been done on this demonstrating d how fluorescence makes diamonds looking hazy during daylight. The most common type of fluorescence is blue fluoresced which is supposedly the culprit behind making the high grade colorless diamond appear hazy. There is some debate about this, but you can forget about all of it.

What’s important to you is this. There is no debate about what blue fluorescence does to lower graded diamonds. It makes them appear whiter. If you want an even better bang for your buck, you can go with a K grade with strong blue fluorescence.

I am 63 years old and I bought my first diamond 36 years ago. It was an engagement ring for the woman I planned to spend the rest of my life with, and so far, I have. I have also presented her with more diamond jewelry over the 35 years of our marriage than I can remember.

But I can remember how hard it was to buy that very first ring. I’ve learned a lot about how to buy diamond rings over the years and I look back at my first buying excursion and have a good laugh at how naïve I was about what’s really important about diamonds. Let me share the story of that first foray into the wonderful world of diamonds.

It’s hard for today’s younger people to fully appreciate this, but there once was a world without an Internet, and I was right in the middle of it.

Back then if you wanted to learn more about the fabled 4 C’s of diamonds – for the unitiated, that’s Color, Clarity, Cut and Carat – you were pretty much limited to a trip to the library. Finding a retail salesperson willing to take the time to teach you a few things without the prospect of an immediate sale was difficult.

And finding a place to buy was even more limited. You could go to an exclusive, and expensive, jewelry retailer or you could go to Service Merchandise – a now defunct catalog showroom retailer that specialized in jewelry.

But for the well connected, there was another option. If you knew the right person, you could buy direct from a diamond rings merchant. These were the guys who cut and sold the stones to the retail jewelers. It took me awhile, but I found a guy who knew some other guy who knew a guy who could get me into Chicago’s fabled Pittsfield building – where the merchants who supplied the exclusive shops along the Magnificent Mile hung out.

So I went and despite the fact that surprising your loved one was in vogue at the time, I decided to take my lady with me. We entered the ancient lobby and ascended to the 11th floor in a creaky old gated elevator. We found our guy, bent over a glass case in his tiny shop. He was the perfect stereotype of a diamond cutter; short, bald, stout, with a 10x magnifier glued to his left eye.

He was pretty nice and the first piece of advice he have us was good – when you’re buying rings, pick the setting before the stone. Even though she knew she wanted a marquis, he told us the setting influences the cut of the stone. He was right. She picked a kind of wrap around setting which required a flatter cut stone.

When we got to the stone itself, I made my big mistake. He took out two stones, held them up to the light and explained to us how the cut determined how much light is let in, which produces that sparkling we all love so much. Then he told us colorless diamonds were better since they let in the most light. All good stuff so far, as I would later learn. When we got to clarity, I dropped the ball. First he told us one of the stones cost almost twice as much as the other. To show us why, he uncorked his magnifier from the left eye and had each one of us put in on to see the flaws within. My lady was impressed, and frankly, so was I. We bought the better stone and after he told us when we could come back to pick up the ring, we both left happy as could be. My lady was radiant and I was as proud of myself as I could be.

When we got to the street it hit me. On the counter, the stones looked identical. The only way you could see the flaws was with the magnifier. I wondered how many of our friends and family carried 10x magnifiers in their pockets and would whip them out to examine the ring as my lady held it up for inspection. No one.

And there was the first and most important lesson I learned about buying diamonds. Within certain limits, the naked eye is the ultimate judge of the quality of a diamond.

Since that first purchase I have bought countless Christmas, birthday, Valentine’s day, and just for nothing gifts of diamond ear rings, necklaces, broaches, and other hand rings and that first lesson has saved me a ton of money. Now let me share a few other things I have learned.

First, as I said, there are limits and size is one of them. Generally that means the Carat or weight, but again if the eye perceives a stone as “big”, forget about the Carat. You’ve seen dozens of movie scenes and commercials where people fall all over themselves viewing a diamond ring that looks big. The line is “Look at the size of that rock!” and it’s been used over and over in hundreds of movies, TV shows, and commercials.

Second, there is a lot of status involved with buying diamonds. Some people are not satisfied to let the diamond jewelry item speak for itself. They have to add the fact that it cost a gazillion dollars or that they bought it at the most exclusive jeweler in town.

You can get the same effect by being a little coy, and not saying anything. When asked where, reply with a devilish wink, “Oh, I have my secret sources”. When asked how much, simply roll your eyes, or reply with a smile “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” Then don’t tell them. Trust me on this, I’ve done it many times and it works.

So that’s my tale and what I have learned. If you trust your eye and can be creative when it comes to adding a little status appeal to the diamonds you’ve bought, you can save a bundle.