San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Diamonds
How to choose a dazzler that’s ethically sourced from the lab.
You only have to look at Instagram to know that the conventional engagement season from Thanksgiving to Valentine’s Day now extends through the summer months. Millennials are making their engagements shared experiences and having their big moment in front of friends and families while on summer vacations, their photos making a big splash on social media within minutes.
Millennials are also driving the trend toward ethically sourced and produced engagement rings like synthetic diamonds, diamonds grown in labs mimicking the natural growth process. According to a report published in February by the International Grown Diamond Association (IGDA), 66 percent of Millennials shopping for an engagement ring say they will consider a labgrown diamond, and 23 percent say they will definitely buy a ring with lab-grown diamonds. They believe buying a diamond which has not been extracted from the earth is a good ethical decision. It’s also a good economic decision. Lab diamonds cost 30 to 40 percent less than their natural equivalents.
Because lab diamonds have the identical chemical, structural and optical properties as earth gems, when evaluating and selecting them it’s important to know they are rated and judged by the same technical standards of mined diamonds, on cut, color, clarity and carat. Each diamond is unique and like its natural counterparts, evaluating it is a similar balance of quality and size, says Beth Gerstein, co-founder of San Francisco’s Brilliant Earth, which sells conflict free- and lab diamonds and has seven showrooms nationwide.
Although lab diamonds are evaluated on the same scale as earth ones, more general terminology is used, according to Brenda Harwick, senior manager of instruction at the Gemological Institute of America’s Carlsbad campus. That’s because of the rating of rarity, which doesn’t apply in lab diamonds.
“GIA invented the famous 4Cs in the 1940s, which became the international grading system recognized around the world,” says Harwick. “When it comes to lab-grown diamonds, our grading report evaluates those four Cs but we use a different description.” For a color rating, Harwick says, GIA will use not the ratings D, E and F to refer to rare, no-color diamonds as it would with natural diamonds. It uses the word “colorless” instead.
Briefly, the stone should be eye-clean, meaning no flaws visible to the naked eye, contain as little color as possible and have a symmetrical cut. Don’t buy a round stone that is set too deep or too shallow for instance because a lot of the light will be lost, instead of bouncing out, and look for aligned and proportional facets. Stone edges should not be too thick or thin. If they are too thick they will make the stone appear too big for the setting and if they are too thin the stone could break. For carat size, it’s important to know that although technology is improving, it’s still hard to find lab-grown stones that are larger than 2 carats. Most stones out there are in the 1 to 2 carat range.