Finally Found a Good Cut

[Peaceandsunshine]

I've been looking for a month or so for a stone that is G, VS1, and has a good HCA score. This is the only one I've found but I don't see a video. Do I trust the HCA score of 1.4? Is $6662 a
good price?

 

[OoohShiny]

There's been some discussions recently over the IGI reports, in that the H&A images seem to be just a pretty picture that's identical on each report, and potentially some other issues (to be investigated):

Attention Shoppers

Rhino's posted 20+pages of Takara H&A rounds. Mostly F color, some D&E's, G's and a handful of G-J I ran one of the lot - scored a .08 HCA.

www.pricescope.com

That said... There isn't a lot of options WRT MMD grading at the moment AGS and GIA do grade them IIRC, but not to the level of detail that they do their Mined stone reports so IGI and GCAL are instead fairly common.


All that said... the angles look good. Have you run it through the HCA tool under the Tools tab? You're looking for an under-2 score ideally, but up to mid-2s should be fine, depending on some more detailed analysis.

Are you able to request ASETscope images to check for faceting consistency and leakage? If they do not offer them, you could purchase one for yourself and use it to check out this stone (and any others you may buy).


The clarity plot looks very (totally??) clean - if it's a VS2 and there is nothing on the plot, that suggests it could perhaps be visible clouds within the stone, which if so, could potentially cause transparency and performance issues.

Do you have a link to a video you could post? Please do place the stone on hold before you post any links to it - lurkers sometimes snap stones up!


WRT price... it is hard to know what to comment. Prices for MMDs are all over the place - seemingly varying from 'unexpectedly reasonable' to 'what we can get away with relative to Mined stone prices', which is not very helpful when one is trying to consider if a purchase would be good value or not.

I think the position one has to take at this point is:

- is it a fair price for what you desire?
- is it an affordable price to you right now?
- are you prepared to totally write-off the money as 'spent' and unrecoverable, seeing as the secondhand market is very new and, potentially, both the New and Secondhand markets may both end up with a lot lower pricing than they currently do?

As long as you are aware you may never be able to get back what you have spent, and are happy to approach an MMD stone with that mindset, we can't ask for much more

 

[Peaceandsunshine]

I just want something sparkly that will hold up with day to day use. Money is a factor, but not a huge issue. I tend to lose things and I really would hate to lose a 30k ring. I don't care about resale, as I will probably wind up losing it anyway and have no plans for passing it down or getting divorced, so I have no expectation of it retaining any value to anyone other than me. I just don't want to get ripped off when I could get the same exact thing for less money.

What I really do want is something that LOOKS good. I want a reasonable size for my hand....which is around 8mm/2 carats, and I want it eye clean and around a G/H in color. I'm going with G, as I've heard IGI can be a bit loose and I don't want a visibly yellow stone. I don't mind a bit of warmth, and in fact, prefer it to ice white. I want lots of sparkle. I don't think it is worth more than 6-7 k to me to have a new ring.

The issue is that it HAS no video. It scored a 1.4 HCA, or close to that, so I want to know if that is trustworthy enough without the video.

And, I'm pretty sure the H&A is just a standard picture. As for flaws, you can see a red line near the culet on the clarity plot. It doesn't say anything about cloudiness. That would be a deal breaker for me, as sparkle is so important.

I didn't think this would be so hard!