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Help! Advice on diamond studs

S

stavros

Rough_Rock
Joined
Feb 11, 2014
Messages
4
Hi

First of all I should say that I do not have a great deal of knowledge about diamonds. I'm also in the UK if that makes a difference. I would like to buy my wife some diamond studs. Budget is around £1000. From my limited knowledge/research I have been looking at pairs of 0.25 ct ideal diamonds from bluenile. I've not been concerned about colour/clarity. Two questions:

1. Is this a good place to buy from in the UK?

2. Are there other diamonds I should be looking at? Is the signature ideal worth the extra? In terms of size, she has quite small ears and usually wears small studs so I think 0.25 ct for each ear would be about right.

Any other advice gratefully received.

Thanks!
 
BN is a fine place to buy studs. Hopefully other UK PSers will be able to help you with alternatives if you'd like some other options though!

In terms of budget... I assume since you use the term "ideal" you're looking at rounds? What are your colour/clarity preferences? You have quite a bit of wiggle-room, if you think she'd love slightly larger stones than she usually wears, or higher colour...

Does the budget include the settings? If so, what settings are you considering?
 
Yssie|1392132372|3612753 said:
BN is a fine place to buy studs. Hopefully other UK PSers will be able to help you with alternatives if you'd like some other options though!

In terms of budget... I assume since you use the term "ideal" you're looking at rounds? What are your colour/clarity preferences? You have quite a bit of wiggle-room, if you think she'd love slightly larger stones than she usually wears, or higher colour...

Does the budget include the settings? If so, what settings are you considering?
Click to expand...

Please excuse my ignorance as I know very little about this but to answer your questions:

1. Yes, I am looking at round diamonds.

2. I don't have any particular colour/clarity preference. My initial research had suggested that, when it comes to earrings, money was better spent on getting ideal diamonds, which made sense to me! I think I would prefer to go slightly bigger than a higher colour but I'm open minded.

3. Yes, the budget includes the settings. I was looking at white gold 4 prongs.
 
1. Okay, that makes buying blind online much easier.

2. Assuming no compromise on cut, prioritising size over colour/clarity would be my preference also, and my recommendation to anyone buying in the US, but I know social norms are different in the UK so I didn't want to make any assumptions. In this size range I'd recommend considering all colours down to I ("I" and above will look dazzlingly white on her ears, absolutely no worries about seeing any body colour) and all clarities down to SI1 (in this size range even reputably graded SI2s will most likely be eyeclean, but since you're buying blind let's cap it at SI1).

3. Budget £80 for the 4prong 14k settings. That leaves ~£950 total for the stones.

I dislike BN's pair-matching system - it matches on table and possibly depth (which is useless), and doesn't consider the angles and other proportions which determine the type of light return you'll see IRL. Looking through their inventory... here are some promising pairs:
 
0.37ct I SI1, 4.72x4.74mm, GIA-EX, No Fluor, T60/C33.5/P40.8/LGF80/S50 £487
http://www.bluenile.com/uk/round-diamond-1-carat-or-less-ideal-cut-i-colour-si1-clarity_LD04074540
+
0.38ct I SI1, 4.74x4.76mm, GIA-EX, No Fluor, T60/C33.5/P40.8/LGF80/S55 £492
http://www.bluenile.com/uk/round-diamond-1-carat-or-less-ideal-cut-i-colour-si1-clarity_LD03857216

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

0.34ct F SI1, 4.52x4.54mm, GIA-EX, Med Blue Fluor, T58/C35/P40.8/LGF80/S45 £490
http://www.bluenile.com/uk/round-diamond-1-carat-or-less-ideal-cut-f-colour-si1-clarity_LD04054077
+
0.34ct G IF, 4.50x4.51mm, GIA-EX, Med Blue Fluor, T58/C35/P40.6/LGF80/S50 £450
http://www.bluenile.com/uk/round-diamond-1-carat-or-less-ideal-cut-g-colour-if-clarity_LD03994646

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

0.32 I VS2, 4.53x4.55mm, GIA-EX, No Fluor, T60/C32/P41/LGF75/S50 £412
http://www.bluenile.com/uk/round-diamond-1-carat-or-less-ideal-cut-i-colour-vs2-clarity_LD04013285
+
0.32 I SI1, 4.48x4.49mm, GIA-EX, No Fluor, T60/C32.5/P40.8/LGF75/S45 £408
http://www.bluenile.com/uk/diamond-search?reason=choice#diamonds_pid=LD04109534

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

0.32 G SI1, 4.40x4.44mm, GIA-EX, No Fluor, T56/C36/P40.6/LGF80/S55 £441
http://www.bluenile.com/uk/round-diamond-1-carat-or-less-ideal-cut-g-colour-si1-clarity_LD03953620
+
0.32 G SI1, 4.38x4.41mm, GIA-EX, No Fluor, T56/C35.5/P40.6/LGF80/S50 £449
http://www.bluenile.com/uk/round-diamond-1-carat-or-less-ideal-cut-g-colour-si1-clarity_LD04028339
 
Thank you very much. Unfortunately these are slightly above my budget when you factor in 20% VAT. What's your reason for picking these ones and I'll do some searching myself?
 
Okay, so first a disclaimer: I am assuming you want the prettiest, most closely-matched pairs possible. When I looked for these pairs I was merciless, but if you aren't as particular or don't have much time there are a number of ways to cut corners - the easiest is to just use BN's in-house matched pairs tool.


I'm comfortable with one colour grade difference between stones for earrings, so E/F, F/G, G/H, H/I, etc. is fine. Clarity is of no importance at all - it's either eyeclean or it isn't, and at these sizes GIA/AGSL SI1+ is "safe" (meaning that you're very unlikely to find one that isn't clean to whatever your requirements are!). At these sizes the cost difference isn't worth restricting the clarity range you search in.

I found these by first setting my upper per-stone price limit. I erred high thinking there may be coupons or promos floating about, but I don't know of any off-hand. For studs I prefer stones with larger tables and lower depths, and shallower crowns and pavilions, because they excel at white light return and tend to face-up larger than others of similar carat weight with steeper & deeper proportions, but keep table between 53 and 61 to be safe.

Probably the biggest factor wrt. picking a visually "matched" pair is the diameter. IRL you've got about 0.1mm to play with before you start to be able to actually note the difference in size, so I look for pairs whose largest and smallest diameters are within a 0.1mm range.

Next I match on table. IRL I'm comfortable with a 1% variance - so a stone with a 56% table and another with a 57% table could be a good match, depending on other proportions, but as you can see I prefer to keep them the same if possible.

Some combinations of crown and pavilion work well together and some don't. An easy way for newcomers to determine which stones are worth further investigation is to pass them through the HCA: https://www.pricescope.com/tools/hca
If the stone scores below a 3 (the official cut-off is 2; that's a very conservative cut-off that eliminates a number of promising combinations and matching pairs is difficult - it took me an hour to find those four pairs - so you don't want to be tossing possibilities out the window) keep it and look for a match. If it scores above 3 move on. In terms of matching, crown and pavilion should be similar, but there aren't hard ranges or pairings for this... odds are very good that a 35/40.6 and 35/40.8 combo will look and perform similarly enough to be considered "matched for earrings" IRL, for example...

LGF. GIA rounds to 5%, and the visual difference between 73 and 82 is significant. Because we don't have pictures or anything else to judge by, I match on percent - both 80, or both 75, or both 70.

Star. By this point your options have become severely limited, so there's really nothing left to match here, but as long as the difference isn't huge (GIA rounds to 5%) - 60 and 45, say - I would consider this the lowest priority.

Keeping girdle as thin as possible permits as much face-up diameter as possible.

I also matched on fluorescence grade, but GIA seems to have something of a "pull a grade out of a hat" policy wrt. fluor, so you'll want to have someone actually look at the stones and confirm fluor is present/similar if that's important to you.
 
 
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