if I ever decide to buy a colored diamond...

[Arkteia]

Which I always stayed away from... merely for lack of knowledge. Is there a website to read about them? A brief advice as to what to stay away from, how to read pictures, etc? I have very limited patience to go through all threads because I get scared by the prices and close the threads. Also, I have minimal info about treatments except for traditional HPHT or laser-drilling... Anything that will be enough for me to buy a small colored diamond?

 

[kenny]

Here's a start, with lots of wonderful links.

https://www.pricescope.com/wiki/fancy-color-diamonds

 

[kenny]

Which I always stayed away from... merely for lack of knowledge. Is there a website to read about them? A brief advice as to what to stay away from, how to read pictures, etc? I have very limited patience to go through all threads because I get scared by the prices and close the threads. Also, I have minimal info about treatments except for traditional HPHT or laser-drilling... Anything that will be enough for me to buy a small colored diamond?

Some meandering FCD opinions . . .
1. Only buy an FCD that was graded by GIA to be of natural mined material and natural color origin.

2. Only buy from a reputable vendor with a good no-questions-asked return policy and honest photography.

3. FCDs change color appearance in real life, so photographing them to look true to life is very difficult. After extensively photographing FCDs myself and making 20 purchases from them I have found the photographs at www.fancydiamonds.net to be very true to life.

4. Watch out for windowing of shallow FCDs.

5. Be aware that each GIA color grade, such as, say, Fancy Intense Yellow can vary a GREAT deal in hue(s) and color strength This makes price comparisons nearly futile even if the diamonds you are comparing are offered by the same vendor and all of the other specs are the same. Basically if it looks better it will cost more.

6. Each hue has adjacent hues and even if GIA graded it (pure) Yellow, it may have a bit of Brown, Orange or Green or Gray in it, but not enough to push it into the Fancy Orangy Yellow grade. This can explain why two Yellows with identical specs vary so much in price - the one with a little brown will be cheaper, and the one with a little green will cost more.

7. Clarity has less effect on price than it does with white diamonds.

8. Price goes up sharply with strength of color and usually peaks at Fancy Vivid.

9. If you want a pink diamond a little brown secondary modifier can save you a ton of money, such as Fancy Brownish Pink, and sometimes the brown is barely, if at all, noticeable to us mortals.

10. Fluorescence can help or hurt the color appearance in surprising ways.

11. Unfortunately FCDs are cut to save weight and strengthen the color. They are NOT for good light performance the material is too precious and cutting to get a Fancy Vivid grade instead of a Fancy Intense grade can add tons of value. As a buyer, adding good light performance to your list of demands will make your FCD safari even more challenging. That said it is not impossible; I have a few with fine light performance.

12. When an FCD has two hues GIA uses a naming convention that tells you how much of each hue is present.
The strongest hue is mentioned last.
For instance here are the grades of diamonds containing purple and pink, listed from the least purple to the most purple:

Purplish Pink
Purple Pink
Pink Purple
Pinkish Purple

 

[chrono]

Just like coloured gemstones, FCDs have to be looked at with the same factors.

1. Colour sets the price. By this, there's hue, saturation and tone.

Rarity of hue sets the first category of price. Reds are more expensive than yellow is an obvious example. Within this category, like other coloured gemstones, the secondary colour can make it more expensive or less expensive. A purple modifier will raise the price of a pink while a brown modifier will lessen the price of a pink FCD.

The second category is the saturation, meaning the more intense the colour, the more expensive the FCD will be. There are several saturation categories ranging from:

1.Faint
2.Very Light
3.Light
4.Fancy Light
5.Fancy
6.Fancy Dark
7.Fancy Intense
8.Fancy Deep
9.Fancy Vivid

2. Treatment. There are so many different treatment methods which can make your head spin.
Coating - This treatment is not permanent and is usually used to mask yellowish tints. It is applied with heat and will eventually wear off with normal wear or during cleaning.
Irradiation - This permanent treatment turns brown and yellow diamonds into fancy coloured greens, blues, and other colours.
High Pressure High Temperature (HPHT) - A permanent treatment method first used to change yellow diamonds into other colours. These days, they turn brown diamonds into the more valued coloured. GE has discovered a HPHT method that is nitrogen-free, which I think makes it more difficult to detect.

3. Size, clarity and cut quality.
I don't think clarity matters all that much, as long as it is eye clean. Some inclusions are less noticeable than others. I don't mind whitish ones but not black specs unless that are super tiny. Many FCDs are not well cut but I aim for at least no major cut issues like windowing and bowties. It would be a shame for diamonds, known for their dispersion, to not show that off.

I wish there's a simple place to read about this but unfortunately, it isn't so. Kenny has written informative posts about FCD grading in various threads and that's all I can think of. For me, I would not buy without the assurance of a GIA lab memo.

 

[kenny]

All good points Chrono.



I wanted to post GIA's all-important color grading scale.
Not all experts agree with it.
FCD guru Stephen Hofer has his own approach to describing FCD color space in 3D, but in the marketplace GIA's scale reigns supreme.

Notice there are three axes, as Chrono mentioned, hue, tone, and saturation.
Many of us, myself included, have trouble wrapping our heads around how tone and saturation relate.

When you look at lots of pics of FCDs and see their GIA color grades you can quickly be confused and surprised - especially with certain examples of Vivid and the two grades next door, Deep and Intense.
Some seem incorrectly graded, and the reason is how tone and saturation are defined, we have to train our eyes do differentiate the two.
After you understand how saturation and tone relate they no longer seem incorrectly graded.

I'm going to get in trouble for phrasing it this way but, I think of tone as how much black there is and saturation as how much color there is. (Posters are free to correct me, or clarify this.)
Now I don't really mean "black".
I mean if you took a black and white picture there is no color, only shades of gray.
The FCD with darker tone will show as a darker gray in a B&W pic.
But also if you had a B&W pic of 3 diamonds with equal tone but one being Fancy, one Fancy Intense and one Fancy Vivid, I believe they would not all look the same shade of gray.
So we are left with two very different reasons that both B&W photography and our untrained brains "see" two different things as one thing.

Next notice GIA's chart looks like a slice of a doughnut, and as you go around the doughnut the hue varies around the color wheel.



FCDs can fall anywhere on the color wheel, such as orangy yellow or greenish blue.
But the two colors have to be next to each other; there can never be a redish green or a bluish orange since they are on opposite sides of the color wheel.

Besides the hues on the color wheel, gray and brown can also be present as a third color, even though I don't think of gray as a real color.
Brown does not appear on the color wheel because I remember from art class that it is a combination of 3 colors not two.
Gray or brown added to the mix lowers the price, though there are some beautiful gray and brown diamonds.

 

[Arkteia]

Thank you, Kenny and Chrono, do you think I should see many with my own eyes before I even attempt to buy?

 

[kenny]

Thank you, Kenny and Chrono, do you think I should see many with my own eyes before I even attempt to buy?

Sure, that would be preferred, but you'd have to do some traveling.
FCDs are rarely seen in local jewelry stores except perhaps some brown ones and maybe a yellow.

 

[T L]

Check old back issues of GIA magazines on colored diamonds as well. There was a book that they sold that compiled all these articles, but none are left in print. They also sell posters on the range of colors for FCD's. If you are seriously interested in a piece, if you can find Hofer's book on FCD's, it is an invaluable resource, but rather expensive since that is also no longer in print.

 

[chrono]

I found a small tutorial section on PS for FCDs.
[URL='https://www.pricescope.com/community/threads/new-fancy-color-diamond-tutorial.171952/']https://www.pricescope.com/community/threads/new-fancy-color-diamond-tutorial.171952/[/URL]