Diamond Carat Size

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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 do a carat comes from and why it's spelt with the C, you have probably would have seen and spelt with a K as 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 has a seed which weighs, well every carob tree which drops carob seeds all have exactly the same weight and became the standard of standard 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, so you get five carats which will weigh a gram.

One-fifth, one gram is a carat and 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 the carat, so again just to put it in perspective, when we are talking about half-a-carat it would be .50 or fifty pointers or fifty points or half-a-carat and remember that there are five carats to a gram. So that gives you an idea that a carat really isn't a 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. Well by the way, here we have carat, carat. It's not the way that a karat is spelled, 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, twelve karat whatever, different karats.

Here we have carat, carat and just now to confuse you, these are not the carrots that rabbits eat, those are carrots, carrots. Let's get our diamond carat right. 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 up 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, how much of the spread of the diamond are you seeing. Now I am going to pick up a big one. It's a five carat; I am going to show you. But, we got to scale it down for practical purpose and imagine, let's say it's a one carat. If this is one carat by weight, average value $67,000 a carat, it would have a millimeter dimension across the top of six and a half millimeters. So, when we talk about carat weights, really we are much more interested in millimeter dimension. But carat weight is a unit. It is accepted measurement so, that's how we will go. Average diamond size for a typical engagement ring, these days is carat and a half to two carats. What would two carats cost you? And 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 other factor that can be played with. An interesting issue that I would like to come back to that, we have discussed it earlier on in selecting your jeweler, I said always pick somebody where you could take your diamond back after a period of time, whether it's a year or many years and say I would like to give you this diamond back and exchange if you have larger one, will you do it? Pick a diamond dealer who will do that because what starts off as an acceptable size, somehow gets smaller over the years. What you can afford when you are getting engaged or married for the first time may not be the same amount you can afford after ten years or twenty years in professional service and where somebody in the relationship becomes senior partner. What was okay as a one carat then becomes little too small, you may want to go to a three carat or four carat or five carat. So that's where the word carat comes in a lot.

And make sure that you can always take the smaller one back and exchange it for a bigger one. All of the four C's, I mentioned earlier on that they can't all be equal in importance, some have to more equal, some have to be less equal. If you remember and if you were with us when we went though the clip on cut, I said that diamond 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 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. So this is me, Ronnie Mervis, signing off for diamond carat weight. Please don't go away, there's lot more exciting diamond information that we want to give you. Thank you.

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