Direct from the diamond Mines????

[Lost_Souls]

I am new to this forum and still trying to learn a couple of things about diamonds. To make the story short, Im looking to purchase some diamonds. My frind who used to work for some jewler who get their diamonds straight from the diamond mines. This elminate the middle man. Now I was wondering how accurately is the diamond grading from the diamond minese?? hope this make sense...

 

[stone-cold11]

Unlikely, you are getting scam here.

 

[Garry H (Cut Nut)]

There are many other ways to get ripped off - like buy cheap diamonds from ebay.
Or just send your money to the people in Nigeria who will pay you back 1,000 times as much because they are really nice people.
Then you have enough money to buy any diamond!

 

[Paul-Antwerp]

Diamonds direct from the mines. Cool. I wonder whether the cutters are in the plane between the mine and the jeweler

 

[Lorelei]

Date: 7/21/2009 3:48:30 AM
Author:Lost_Souls
I am new to this forum and still trying to learn a couple of things about diamonds. To make the story short, Im looking to purchase some diamonds. My frind who used to work for some jewler who get their diamonds straight from the diamond mines. This elminate the middle man. Now I was wondering how accurately is the diamond grading from the diamond minese?? hope this make sense...

I wouldn''t touch this deal with a twenty foot pole. If you want to buy some diamonds, stick with a known trusted vendor.

 

[Lula]

Are they cut? Or just shapeless lumps?

Doesn''t pass the smell test (or the logic test)!

Run!

 

[denverappraiser]

I think you might want to review your basic assumptions, specifically that ‘middlemen’ add no value, only costs, and that these things are somehow free if they are delivered by a single company. A mine owner can certainly set up a store where they sell things directly to consumers or a merchant can buy a mine, but does this really result in any savings? Is it really helpful for these operations to be in the same location? Tiffany’s owns interests in mining operations and DeBeers owns retail outlets so both of these would qualify as buying ‘directly from the mine’ but few would argue that these are inexpensive places to shop.

Some examples:

Cutting as mentioned above. If you don't plan on cutting it yourself, that's a 'middleman'.

Grading. How do you plan on deciding which stone is better, or even different, than which? Surely you know that superficially similar looking rocks can go for enormously different prices and presumably your objective is to choose one that is comparatively low in price. How do you plan to choose?

Security. Believe it or not, there are people in the world who don’t share your best interest, or the best interests of the miner. Both of you have important security concerns.

Recourse. What happens if your deal doesn’t go as expected?

Shipping. It’s considerably easier (read cheaper) to ship a diamond to you than it is to ship you to the diamond.

Variety. Does the store/mine actually have what you want? An attractive price on the wrong thing is no bargain.

Laws. Most diamond customers don’t live in the same country as the mines and laws can vary dramatically from one place to the next. What may seem reasonable at home can get your money and/or property seized or even get you jailed somewhere else.

Neil Beaty
GG(GIA) ICGA(AGS) NAJA
Professional Appraisals in Denver

 

[WinkHPD]

Date: 7/21/2009 3:48:30 AM
Author:Lost_Souls
I am new to this forum and still trying to learn a couple of things about diamonds. To make the story short, Im looking to purchase some diamonds. My frind who used to work for some jewler who get their diamonds straight from the diamond mines. This elminate the middle man. Now I was wondering how accurately is the diamond grading from the diamond minese?? hope this make sense...

I can not speak for your jeweler directly, but let me share my experience when I graduated from GIA in 1975 and went to work for a local jeweler here in Boise. Come to think of it, the below held true even when I opened my own store in 1979. It continues with subtle changes to be true even today, although there are now more labs and Rap to further confuse the issues to some while helping others.

At that time, to the knowledge of anyone at GIA and to any one that I met in the business here, I was the first person in Idaho to have gone through the GG program in residence at GIA. I was that most dangerous of creatures in the trade, the new GIA graduate, ready to share my knowledge at the drop of a hat, not knowing that this knowledge was largely unwanted at the retail level. I probably cost my very kind and wonderful employer a lot of lost sales, although I was selling more of the larger diamonds fairly quickly, so I hope I balanced things out for him in the end. He was a wonderful mentor and is still one of my heros.

My experience was this. No matter what I ordered from the diamond vendors we were using, if it did not have a GIA paper on it, it was over graded. PERIOD! Worse, there was no Rap sheet, so we were completely at the mercy of the vendors for pricing unless we wanted to travel to New York or LA (prices were 10-15% higher in LA at that time) to get better pricing by being able to compare improperly graded diamonds and haggle better for prices.

Vendors knew that to get our business when they came to town they had but to offer better prices. I spoiled some of this by pointing out that the stones were more overgraded than the vendor that we were already using. They countered by giving us better pricing still, and then once they had the business going back up to their normal bad pricing. I churned through many vendors, never keeping any very long as it seemed to be part of the culture to abuse buyers in small areas.

Thus it became a rule for me, long before it was the rule for most, that if I wanted a diamond I could confidently stand behind, it had to have paper. (This was also before EGL and IGI I believe, I do not remember when I first heard of them, but it was after my late 1975 debut in the trade.) There was no cut grade assigned to any stone by any lab, it would be more than a decade, maybe two before AGS would come to being, primarily because GIA refused to give a cut grade on stones submitted by AGS members.

Now this is just my experience, and you are welcome to take it or leave it, but if I were a consumer today who did only minimal research I would be demanding a paper from either GIA or AGS and I would accept NO IMITATIONS. I would especially be careful of someone claiming to buy directly from the mines as that is just not likely to be true unless the store is doing several millions of dollars per month to make it worth the mine owner''s time to skip selling directly to DeBeers or one of the other current market makers who would take his entire production each month. Unless of course, the store owner was willing to pay significantly more than the other market makers, which negates the advantage you are seeking to gain. Oh, and it would also make it much more likely that you could be dealing with conflict diamonds as someone selling directly to a small market would have more opportunity to sell diamonds that could perhaps not be sold through legitimate channels.

All of that having been said, there is one way you might come out okay. Pick a diamond, obviously using the "wow" factor that Storm speaks about in another thread since there will be none of the technical data that we like to use today to evaluate the diamond and buy it contingent of it coming back from the GIA with a color and clarity grade equal to that claimed by the jeweler. If he takes this deal then you might well come out ahead. What is more likely is that he will of course refuse this deal as fill in the blank since it is something he already knows will not happen.

Wink

P.S. Please accept or reject the above with the knowledge that I am a vendor only of papered goods, and thus I may have a self interest in stating the truth as I see it above.

 

[arjunajane]

Lost Souls,
no it doesn''t make sense!
Please listen to the advice you receive here.


Neil and Wink, cheers for the great and informative posts.

 

[Lost_Souls]

Thx for all the HELP ppl...The most helpfull was WINK....I now understand more.. Yes the person I was planning on getting the diamond from does deals with millions of dollars...they sell their diamonds to majority of the malls and jewlery district in downtown ...Hes doing a big favor for a friend..I happen to just know the right ppl...Lucky me...Also I have purchase from him before...I have got an appraisal from another jewler and I could actually sell the ring I have gotten for a higher price...I just wanted to know how was the grading... BUT THX for all that try to help me to avoid scams...