Jewelry Diamonds Information

Color Treated Diamonds

Many people are starting to favor the fancy, vivid colored diamond gem stones over the traditional transparent, or white, diamond. Some diamonds are found in their natural colors when they are mined, others become colored by gemologists and jewelers during a treatment process.

In order to make them more affordable to the average consumer, companies have begun color treating diamonds of lower grades in order to take a less desirable yellow or brownish tinted diamond and make it into a beautiful, brightly colored diamond.

Colored diamonds can be treated by a process called irradiation, which uses a high heat system to alter the color of a diamond. Other diamonds are treated by painting.

Fancy Colored Diamonds

While many diamonds are inspected and valued based on their colorless qualities, there are people who prefer the fancy colored diamonds that come in vivid hues of greens, yellows, reds, pinks and all the different colors in between.

Some colored diamonds are that way naturally. If a diamond has nitrogen in it, it often has a yellow tint to the stone. If the gemstone has been effected by radiation, the gem may turn green.

Other colored diamonds have been treated to obtain their color, and this allows people with lower budgets to purchase the fancy colored diamonds. Gemologists have found ways to alter the colors of diamonds to get any shade or hue desired.

The grading process for colored diamonds is slightly different than that of the transparent diamond. First, a colored diamond is graded based on the primary hue, the blue or pink or red color that makes up the majority of the diamonds color. Second, they are graded based on the intensity of that color. A very intense, naturally colored diamond is more rare than a less intense diamond, and therefore more expensive. A treated diamond will cost less than a naturally colored diamond in most instances.

Synthetic Diamonds

Most diamonds are found and mined by miners, but more recently, scientists have come up with ways to create synthetic diamonds. While a synthetic diamond is still a "real diamond", they are created within a laboratory instead of by nature in a mine.

Colored Diamond Names

Because fancy colored diamonds come in so many different shades, it can sometimes be difficult to interpret the name of the diamonds color. Often, you'll find two colors labeling the shade of a diamond, such as greenish blue. Each name has a primary color description, and some have a secondary color description.

If a diamond is called "blue diamond", you can tell it will be a blue shaded diamond gemstone. If the diamond is called "greenish blue", you may wonder what that means. Is the diamond blue, or is it green?

The color that is described with the "ish" at the end is considered the secondary color, and the other color, in this case blue, becomes the primary color. So a greenish blue diamond is mostly blue, with specks of green seen throughout the stone. If you come upon a diamond labeled "brown red", then the diamond will have equal amounts of both colors seen through the stone.

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Labels: colored, diamond, diamonds names, fancy, jewelry diamonds, synthetic

In a state park full of amateur diamond miners, one prospector dug up a valuable stone worth thousands of dollars - or did he?

At Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas, visitors can pay a $7 admission fee, grab a shovel and try their hand at diamond prospecting. The rule is "finders keepers."

Over the past three years, annual visitation has tripled to 170,000, and in 2007 tourists pulled more than 1,000 precious stones from the ground. Some visitors use a special screen known as a seruca to wash and separate the heavier diamonds from the lighter debris. Others just get down on their hands and knees, squinting for jewels in the furrows.

The 800-acre park holds out the hope, however slim, that just about anyone can strike it rich. Unfortunately, the park may also hold out a temptation for mineralogical mischief.

Eric Blake, a 33-year-old carpenter, has been coming to Crater of Diamonds two or three times a year ever since his grandfather first took him there when he was a teenager.

In October 2007, his hard work finally paid off with the discovery of a whopping 3.9-carat stone - nearly the size of the site's Kahn Canary diamond that Hillary Clinton borrowed for her Arkansas-born husband's presidential inaugural galas. It's the kind of rare find that's spectacular enough to attract national attention.

Blake reportedly spotted the elongate, white diamond along a trail just as he was plunking down a 70-pound bucket of mud and gravel he planned to sort through.

His lucky stone could be worth as much as $8,000 - if he can prove it came from Arkansas soil. In the year since his discovery, fellow collectors, park officials and law enforcement officers have started wondering how Blake and his family uncovered an unprecedented 32 diamonds in less than a week.

"We have a concern of maintaining the integrity of not only the park, but the state of Arkansas," says park superintendent Tom Stolarz, who caught a glimpse of the diamond as Blake was packing to leave the park. Although Stolarz is not a geologist, he has been at the park for 26 years and has handled more than 10,000 diamonds, paying special attention to large stones.

Blake's rough-hewn gem was certainly a diamond to Stolarz's eyes, but was it an American diamond?

The answer is more important than one might think. Diamonds are merely crystallized carbon and today they can be created economically in a lab. But the stones fascinate people; the National Museum of Natural History's diamond exhibit, featuring the Hope Diamond, is one of the most popular destinations in the Smithsonian Institution.

For many diamond buyers, history buffs and a quirky subculture of dedicated diamond hunters, provenance is everything.

Diamonds were discovered in Arkansas in August 1906, when a farmer named John Wesley Huddleston found a "glittering pebble" on his property. The next year the New York Times described "Diamond John's" treasure in epic terms: "The story of the discovery of diamond fields in one of the poorest counties of the not over-rich State of Arkansas reads like a chapter of Sinbad's adventures."

More than 10,000 dreamers flocked to nearby Murfreesboro, filling up the ramshackle Conway Hotel and striking up a tent city between town and the diamond field. It was not an easy life, says Mike Howard of the Arkansas Geological Survey.

"Many people came, few people found," he says. "Most were gone within a couple of years." The majority of Arkansas diamonds, then as now, come in at under ten points, or about 1/10th of a carat.

But in 1924, one lucky miner pulled a 40-carat monster out of the ground. Christened Uncle Sam, it remains the largest diamond ever discovered in the United States and a twinkle in every miner's eye.

A lot of funny business has gone on around the diamond field over the past century. After failing to gain full control of the area in 1910, the London-based Diamond Syndicate allegedly set up a sham operation to downplay the mine's potential and sabotage production, according to a Justice Department investigation.

In 1919, two rival processing plants burned to the ground on the same January night, fueling rumors that someone was out to destroy the mine's profitability.

In the late 1920s, Henry Ford was set to buy Arkansas industrial diamonds for his assembly lines, but the Diamond Syndicate and De Beers bribed the mine's owner to keep it out of commission.

Shenanigans continued into the 1950s, when, for instance, an entrepreneur trucked some gravel from the diamond field to his own five acres north of town and plunked down a sign claiming he had a diamond mine. Locals found him beaten up in a ditch the next morning, according to a story one Arkansas geologist has told over the years.

By Brendan Borrell Smithsonian.com

Labels: arkansas, diamonds, diamonds state park, jewelry diamonds

Diamonds form between 75-120 miles below the earth's surface. According to geologists the first delivery of diamonds was somewhere around 2.5 billion years ago and the most recent was 45 million years ago. The carbon that makes diamonds comes from the melting of pre-existing rocks in the Earth's upper mantle.

There is an abundance of carbon atoms in the mantle. Temperature changes in the upper mantle forces the carbon atoms to go deeper where it melts and finally becomes new rock, when the temperature reduces. If other conditions like pressure and chemistry is right then the carbon atoms in the melting crystal rock bond to build diamond crystals.

There is no guarantee that these carbon atoms will turn into diamonds. If the temperature rises or the pressure drops then the diamond crystals may melt partially or totally dissolve. Even if they do form, it takes thousand of years for those diamonds to come anywhere near the surface.

It takes millions of years to make a diamond. When you own a diamond, you own something which is a legend in the making. It has not been made in a factory just the other day. A diamond comes from the bosom of the earth. More interestingly not all the diamonds mined are made into jewelry.

Only one fourth of the diamonds that are mined are made into jewelry. Every 100 tons of mud produces one carat of a diamond. And this one carat is not one stone! It could be anything from 0.005 ct to 1 ct. because much of the original stone is cut away in the process of cutting, shaping and polishing the diamond.

Diamonds come in different rough shapes. The next time you look at your diamond, think about the amount of time, energy and resources have gone into making that one.

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