Ronnie Mervis: Hi, I am back, Ronnie Mervis from Mervis Diamond Importers. We are now going to talk about the fourth C, the final C which stands for diamond carat weight. By the way did anybody ever think where does a carat come from and why it's spelt with the C, you have probably seen it spelt with a K as well. Well, first little tidbit, not worth much, but as long as we are talking about it, let's play with it.

The carob tree has a seed, Carob is spelled as Carob. Every carob tree which drops carob seeds all have exactly the same weight and that became the standard of weight for the diamonds. The word carob has changed over the course of time and now it's become carat. What is a carat, that's a unit of weight, how much? One-fifth of one gram. A carat is then divided in to one hundred points. We always talk about a ten pointer or a twenty pointer. Twenty pointer would mean point two over carat, half a carat would be point five over a carat, so that gives you an idea that a carat really isn't an awful amount of lot of weight. Just to tell you what a carat isn't, so we can get rid of the few misconceptions. It's not the same as karat spelt with a K. That karat is a measurement of fineness of gold. When we are talking about gold, we are talking about 24 karat or 14 karat or 10 karat, different karat. Now we have just decided that a carat is a unit of weight. Diamonds are weighed and the more they weigh, the more diamond you get and the more the price goes, and the less, the other way around as well. It's somewhat of a misconception that people should buy diamonds by weight because you can't see weight. Weight is a unit of mass. That's simply how heavy an item is. Much more important is how big it is crosswise. So, when we talk about carat weights, really we are much more interested in millimeter dimension. Every diamond size for a typical engagement ring, these days is carat-and-a-half to two carats. What would two carats cost you? A reasonable quality, two carats round about $15,000-$20,000. The more money there is the bigger you can go, the less money the other way round. But, I do want to remind that we spoke about price being a function of the four C's and one of the factors in the four C's was carat weight in determining the price, we can pick up carat weight as high as we want or we can drop carat weight as low as you want. It's one of the factors that can be played with. All of the four C's, if you remember and if you were with us when we went though the clip on cut, I said that cut was the most important and I think it is.

Color and clarity are somewhat important, but carat weight is not the most important of all, because within a given range, if you dropped a few points, let us say you are just out of your price range and you are having to consider whether you would like to go with a carat 90 or a carat 70 or a carat 60, it's one way you can easily drop those 30 points. It looks less on paper, it's very hard to see the difference in millimeters, it's a good way to take something back off the table, if you are trying to get the maximum diamond cut, the maximum color and clarity out of the stone. But everything is individual choice and we leave that to you.