Today’s Diamond Review Request is from Sue who is looking for an F-color VS-clarity diamond that is around .7 – .8cts. She’s found three diamonds and wants to know which has the best light performance and if there is a diamond that represents the best value for money. Let’s take a look!
Diamond 1
Diamond 1 is a 0.81ct FVS1 being sold for $4310.
This diamond has a 35.5° crown, which on its own is potentially steep but the diamond is well designed and the pavilion of the diamond has been cut shallow at 40.6° in order to balance it out. This is why the diamond still looks nice and bright under the table facet. I like that it has a 57% table, 61.6% total depth, and 3.5% girdle thickness which all contribute to a better spread, which is important because the crown angle is slightly steep and the lower girdles are slightly steep and both of these things takes away from the spread of the diamond.
The weight ratio of the diamond is therefore 1.057 which is considered acceptable. However, this weight ratio is high given the proportions and the reason is because this diamond has painted upper girdles. The diamond will therefore have less sparkle at the edges where the upper girdles are even though overall painting helps the stone appear brighter.
The diamond has excellent optical symmetry, but it’s not a hearts and arrows diamond since at least one of these arrows (2 o’clock) is misaligned. Both the major and minor facets are cut pretty symmetrical and the contrast pattern is excellent. Despite the painting, overall I would say this diamond should have pretty decent sparkle. As an FVS1, both color and clarity are non-issues.
Diamond 2
Diamond 2 is a 0.71ct FVS1 James Allen True Hearts being sold for $3740.
This diamond appears a bit blurry in the 360 video despite the diamond being a VS1, has excellent polish, no cloud inclusions, and no other comments relating to graining in the diamond. Nevertheless, this is something to be concerned about because sometimes the material of the diamond is just less transparent. You’re not really going to notice unless a diamond expert points it out to you but this is definitely something to differentiate two FVS1s.
As a true hearts diamond, all of the proportions are within the recommended range. A 62% total depth is on the high side and this is due to the 4% girdle thickness which is a bit of wasted weight. The weight ratio is 1.059 so it’s not that much worse than the first diamond. This diamond has some dug out upper girdles so if we had an ASET of this stone, the edges will show up as green and is usually sufficient for me to reject a diamond. This is one of the things that differentiate a true H&A diamond from Whiteflash, Brian Gavin, or High Performance Diamonds vs a James Allen True Hearts.
Diamond 3
Diamond 3 is a 0.71ct FVS2 James Allen True Hearts being sold for $3210.
When I see lots of blue and brown colors in a James Allen 360, I know that the diamond doesn’t have very strong light return. This is because the diamond picks up light more from the sides rather than from the front. By default, most of James Allen’s suppliers send their diamonds to GIA so when looking for a diamond from James Allen, make sure that you avoid the AGSL ones in particular the ones that come with a regular diamond quality document and not a platinum diamond quality document. The reason for this is to avoid diamonds that have been borderline graded when the manufacturers try to shop around for a better color or clarity grade. In this case, this isn’t a very good VS2 with a large black crystal right in the center of the diamond.
Recommendation
A budget upwards of $4310 can get you a pretty nice super-ideal 0.7ct FVS2. In fact, here is a great 0.75ct FVS2 Whiteflash A Cut Above. For the 3 diamonds I reviewed above, Diamonds 2 and 3 can be safely rejected so Diamond 1 is the best of the three. However, this Whiteflash A Cut Above I am recommending is really heads and shoulders above all of these diamonds. You get a much better cut super-ideal diamond with perfect hearts and arrows for less money and there is only a 0.2mm size difference.
What does everyone think? Please share your views in the comments.
Thanks for the review. Its a very detailed explanation.
1) Do you mind making an explanation about interpreting Holloway cut adviser results? I understand that a score of 0-2 is excellent, and 0-1 being more suitable for ear ring and pendant. But, Is a score of 1 more ideal than 1..4?
2) I didn’t know in 360 degree james allen video – brown and blue correlates to poor light return.
3) Do you have any other recommendation from any of the online diamond vendors for a diamond between 0.75 – 0.8 carat +/-, colourless, VS2 clarity and above( must be eye clean) that is below $5000? must be very ideal cut with maximum light return, sparkles and fire.
Many thanks,
Sue
Hi Vincent, for the diamond that you have recommended on whiteflash, do you mind explaining how do I interpret the ideal scope image and the ASET image? How come they r not as red and as blue as it should be..
@sue
If you are looking for a super-ideal cut diamond then you can interpret the HCA as a simple pass/fail test. A super-ideal diamond will score under 2.0 in the HCA so you can reject anything that is above a 2.0. Lower is not necessarily better on the HCA and statistically a 0.8 is no better than a 1.2 meaning that a 1.0 is the ‘best’ score you can get. However, the HCA cannot tell you if a 1.4 is better than that 1.0 so you should not focus too much on the HCA score.
As for how to interpret the idealscope and ASET, you can refer to my tutorial here. One thing that I can add is to not focus on the particular colors (red, green, blue) because they will be slightly images from different sellers because the photography equipment they use and the color of the filters in the scopes they use will also be different. The idealscope tells us the intensity of the light return and the ASET identifies where the light is coming from so it’s the color mapping and the patterns that you see that are important.
Here is a larger diamond I can recommend that meets your budget/specs.