I'm ready to get my hands wet in seriously finding a diamond. My budget is no more than $4300 and I'm looking for 0.90 - 0.92 carat diamond that is eye clean with ideal cuts. Can anyone recommend me a few that would have HCA < 2?
Otherwise, I'd suggest using the parameters I posted in the other thread and try Blue Nile. I think many of their top tier (signature?) stones are usually within those parameters.
Keep in mind that the photos you see on listings are extremely magnified, at least 20x normal size. At 0.9cts, you’re looking at something that’ll be around 6.3-6.4mm in diameter. And in normal lighting conditions, brilliance and scintillation on a well cut round brilliant will mask a lot of inclusions (with the exception of big crystals, white or black in colour) at regular viewing distances (around a foot away from your eyes).
At the colour clarity levels you are looking at, you’re gonna need to be at around the US$6k mark and above for in house stones.
I would argue that anything above VS1 is overkill for a stone that's less than 1ct. I would be looking at VS2/SI1. If you look at WF, they say if a stone is eye clean or not. So I would use that as a benchmark for whether a stone will be clean enough.