Fancy Colored Diamonds: Redefining Engagements
We’ve always had traditions regarding courtship and marriage which could never be broken. There’s that superstition about the bride prohibited from wearing the wedding dress before her wedding date – we all are familiar with that, and nobody wants to mess with that superstition!
However, there are other seemingly revered traditions that have gradually been modified. Take for instance the wedding rings. During our parents’ era, wedding rings had to be solid bands without stones to mean that the love that binds them should be continuous, unbroken, and infinite.
These days, wedding rings are studded with diamonds of all shapes and sizes. In fact, the more ornate the design, the more preferred they are. In addition, what used to be just white diamonds used for the rings are now being substituted with fancy colored diamonds.
We see celebrities displaying their fancy colored diamonds on the red carpet and on screen. Because of their influence, more and more people are now choosing fancy colored diamonds over plain white diamonds.
Natural diamonds can come in various hues, the most common of which are brown and yellow. Rarer fancy colored diamonds come in elegent shades of blue, such as the world-famous Hope Diamond; green, such as the Dresden Green – the world’s largest green diamond, at 40.7 carats; or red, such as that auctioned off at Christie’s with a price tag of $536,000 per carat.
Fancy colored diamonds are admittedly flawed – the imperfections in the stone are what give the fancy colored diamonds their coloration. Yet, they have been gaining popularity as engagement and wedding ring stones of choice because of their uniqueness and unparalleled beauty.
Just as clear diamonds are durable and able to withstand daily wear, so too can fancy colored diamonds. It can also be said that they are more personalized because a man can pick a fancy colored diamond in his fiancees favorite color.
What to watch out for
You should be extra careful when choosing fancy colored diamonds, because there’s such a thing as irradiated colored diamonds. Stones that have a faint blue or faint pink coloration, for instance, are treated with low radiation fields to intensify their color.
In addition, the GIA has also assigned fancy colored diamonds a different color scale instead of the usual D to Z scale used for mined diamonds. These scale for these colored gems use descriptors from faint to fancy vivid, so it would do you well to read on their characteristics first before making your purchase.
