Diamonds - Overview of the Four "C"s

Hi, this Ronnie Mervis, from Mervis Diamond Importers and welcome back. I am glad, you are still with us, because we are now going to discuss most important thing that there is to talk about, regarding in purchase of your diamond and so this is something that you should focus on.

It is called the four C's. The four C's stands for color, clarity, carat weight and cut. They can be in any different orders, so the next time I say them, I may not say them in same sequence, but it is important that we talk about it.

In this chapter, I am not going to dwell on each one specifically. I am going to simply tell you what it is and I am going to make the point of telling you are they all related to each other.

To my left, I have a beautiful little diagrammatic pyramid, which demonstrates what we are talking about. It has four sides to it, as I flip you will see, we have color; we will come back to it. Here is the demonstration of diamond color, which you may not see very clearly, clarity, carat weight and cut.

Let's start talking about diamond cut, first. In a later chapter we will deal with cut in detail, but here just simply to tell you, what cut is. Cut, relates to the actual proportioning of the diamond. Here I am going to hold up a diamond and you can see that it has angles and facets. If the diamond cut perfectly, it will give you the maximum brilliance. If it cuts less than perfectly, it won't. I hope this is not blocking our little pyramid.

Here we have color, diamonds come in many different colors and each one has a different degree of rarity on the color scale and it affects the price. Here we have clarity; clarity talks about what is inside the diamond, each diamond has a certain purity or lack of purity or degree of clarity or lack of clarity and here we have carat weight which talks about the size of the diamond.

You may notice that this pyramid is exactly that, it is a pyramid. It has a broad base at the bottom rising to an apex at the top. The bulk of the diamonds in any one of these categories; carat, cut, color or clarity are all at the bottom. The more they are at the bottom, the more they are, so the lesser value they have in terms of rarity. The finer they are within each category, so the more they rise to the top.

Now, the price of the diamond and money is everything. We hear so many times, money is no object. Well, that's not always true. In the end money is always the object. The price is determined by the interaction of where the diamond you select falls in each of these characteristics; cut, color, clarity and carat weight to the top. The higher the clarity, the higher the carat weight, the higher the cut and the higher the color; so the greater the price of the diamond will be.

Now, any diamond could have any variation of any of these four factors. It could be high in color and low in clarity or it could be high in clarity and small in carat weights or could be large in carat weight; perfectly cut, but low in the color scale; every one is different. It is the summation of each of these four C's its called the four C's; cut, color, clarity and carat weight, which determine the value.

So, I hope you have it and I would like you to stay tuned because in the next clip we are going to start talking about the four C's in turn. So, don't go away, this is Ronnie Mervis from Mervis diamond inviting you to stay with us for the next series when we start examining in turn each one of the C's of the four C's of diamonds, thank you.