LUXURY ON A BUDGET

 CARAT WEIGHT The last of the "C"s is carat weight.    This is not the same as the Karat that indicates the percentage of gold in a piece of jewelry. Carat comes from the Carob Bean.  The carob has round seeds, and they are all fairly uniform in size.  Lacking anything else to use as a standard of measure in early times, they decided that the carob beans were regular enough to use as a standard of measure. One carob bean was a carat. My question is what happens as the bean dries out and gets lighter? A carat is divided into 100 points.  So, one and a half carats was 1.5c. or 150 points and a quarter carat is .25ct or 25 points. Diamonds become rarer in larger sizes.  As they become rarer, they become more expensive, but not evenly...they jump up in price as they reach certain sizes.  This is not absolute, but .25 or 25 points is a size that experiences a sudden change.  .5 is another jump in price....75 as well.  One carat is a fairly la...

 CLARITY I think this is pretty easy to figure out...If there is nothing at all inside the stone but diamond, then it is clear and flawless. When an appraiser looks at a stone, he does it with ten power magnification.  If he looks at the stone under an eye loop or a microscope and sees nothing at all in the entire stone, then he may judge the stone to be flawless or he may say Internally Flawless.  This includes things like abrasions, scratches and chips. There are lots of opportunities to hide imperfections in the stone.  When you look at one, the center is pretty easy to see right through the stone to the bottom.  But as you move to the sides, the complex play of light and the many facets of the cut stone can mask what is inside, basically hiding whatever is there with light and reflections. The jewelry piece may have prongs or a band of gold holding the stone into the setting.  These may be strategically placed to cover a flaw that is located near the ed...

 It is interesting that diamond prices are very artificial.  There are organizations like DeBeers that have huge stockpiles of diamonds in storage.  Probably (in my mind) there sre more in storage than there are out in the market.  This artificial rarity keeps prices high.  And yet they continue to mine them every year.   If they released all those diamonds onto the market the prices would drop everywhere to the point you might be able to buy them in cartons of a dozen like eggs in gas station convenience stores. ================================================================================== Fake and lab created diamonds. Unless you are trying to get a potential lover into bed with a jewelry purchase.... JUST DON'T BUY THEM! Lab created diamonds are technically and CHEMICALLY diamonds, but not real.  I have a deep-seated prejudice I guess against anything artificial.  It is such a strange market, that some companies actually put flaws into...

 COLOR Diamonds are found in all sorts of earth tones from silvery gray to black or ecru to brown.  There are also fancy colors like attractive shades of yellow, pink, lavender, purple, blue, orange and red.  There are plenty of variations as a nice pure yellow or blue may have grayish or brownish influences and anything else you can imagine. Color of a stone is graded from D to ...well whatever E, F, G.....  I have never seen anything that would be whiter than a D.   The closer to a pure white(colorless) the more expensive it will be...UNTIL it grades far enough from the white to become attractive to the eye.  A slight brownish tinge to the stone may become a very attractive champagne or a beautiful brown.  An off-color yellow in a stone eventually becomes dark enough to become an attractive canary or lemon yellow, gold or whatever shade you can imagine.  I have seen some yellow diamonds that look like nothing less than hardened dog urine......

  As I mention this damage possibility, it reminds me to warn you that jewelry needs regular care.   Take it to a jeweler regularly to have them check to see if stones are getting loose.  Catching them on your sweater or hitting them casually while wearing them can loosen stones, bend the points of the prongs or even chip and damage the stones.   Most good jewelry is a big investment, and it is a shame if you look down to see a valuable stone broken or missing from the setting.  Abrasion just in day-to-day life over time can wear the tops of the soft metal prongs off leaving the stone ready to just drop out.    Little beads of metal can be added to the prongs to resecure the stone (Repointing) Unfortunately, this can make the ring or other pieces of jewelry catch on things like cloth or clothing and hair.  You become used to the worn points over time so the newly repointed prongs can be irritating.  You can ask the jeweler to file t...

 Pear shaped diamonds This is a chimera stone.  It has the rounded end that may have good life in it, and the long pointed end that has less life in it.  I just love pear shaped stones...graceful I guess, like a teardrop in a pendant.  I used a number of ovals and pears in the wedding set I made for my family.  They also are a graceful shape on a finger.  Still, there is that pointed end that can be vulnerable to breakage and striking the stone on the side of that pointed end can rotate the stone in the setting a bit and loosen it in the setting. This stone too is easy to hide flaws inside at the pointed end.

 Marquis (Marquise) shaped diamonds. This shape is sometimes referred to as a navette,(usually in colored stones) from the French for little boat.  They are long ovals or ellipses that come to a point rather than a rounded end. To my eye they have less life than some other shaped stones and can, again, form dark shapes inside.  They are also cut from more awkward pieces of rough.  They are very useful, again, in complex jewelry design.  I have never seen a Marquis shaped diamond ring or pendant that I liked.  The long narrow shape exposes the sides of the stone to possible damage.  Often the points of the stone can be easily broken as well.  The points are often capped with a broad prong that covers the point.  When the stone is struck, the stone can often be shifted sideways(diagonally) in its mount and the stone can come loose easily or break off at the points. This is not a stone for an active lifestyle. The long, pointed shape can also ha...

 Ovals: These can be very pretty stones and are useful in complex designs and the stone is a very flattering shape on the finger or around the neck. Sometimes ovals, like many of the odd shapes, are cut from awkwardly shaped crystals or lumps and shards of rough diamond. (Again, they are trying to salvage as much material as possible, so a roughly oval piece of rough stone MAY best produce an oval finished stone.)  A stone may be a bit too thin to make a deep stone, but an oval or many other shapes can be cut.  A poorly shaped rough can result in a rather lifeless stone and strange dark shapes can be seen in the facets, sometimes looking gray or even black.  Bow tie shapes show up in the stone.  Be critical of the sparkle and reflected color in the stone as these characteristics can suffer.  Also, trying to salvage these shallow rough stones can result in a rather broad table revealing more of the inside of the stone than is desirable and again cutting down...

Asher cut stone  Emerald cuts: Round is very common but there are also, square or rectangular stones (emerald cut) (also Asher cut). The corners of the Emerald cuts are cut off, so you have an octagon with 2 pairs of longer sides. (The pointed corners of a stone like a Baguette, can be prone to breakage.)  Emerald cuts are usually slightly cheaper because they simply follow the shape of the crystal structure, have fewer facets and are easy and faster to cut.  Unfortunately, they do not have the fire and sparkle of round stones and all those flat surfaces allow you to easily look deep into the stone.  You notice every flaw in the stone.  Very large stones are often cut this way in order to salvage as much size and weight as possible.  Basically, there is very little waste.  Smaller and simpler stones are called baguettes and they are much cheaper and are used decoratively in pieces of jewelry so that you see a change in texture in a complicated assortme...

 Let's single cut look at CUT. ========================================================================== CUT, especially in round stones. If you look at pictures of the pyramids at Giza in Egypt, you will have a pretty fair idea of what a diamond crystal will look like under an electron microscope.  Layers are arranged in planes in a square pattern.  If some guy with a pry bar went up on the sides of the pyramid, he could easily separate the stones.    So, this cleaving of the stone was a good start for the discovery of how to cut the stones.  Unfortunately, this easy cleavage is also a great downfall, as all it takes is a good rap on the end of the grain to break a diamond.  Great care must be taken to make sure the edges of the stone are protected so it cannot be easily hit. Big stones become very vulnerable as a result.  Don't wear your 30 carat emerald cut stone working on the roof or shoeing the horse.  Just a grazing hit on a metal or...

 DIAMONDS This is a pretty big subject simply because the value of the stones is so high that extreme care is used when they are purchased. Diamonds are the hardest jewelry stone available. Strangely though, they are very easy to break. People confuse the hardness of a mineral with toughness.  Hardness means simply that there are materials that will scratch the subject material and some that will not be scratched by it. You can crush a diamond easily just by giving it a pound with a hammer (steel is in the general 5 to 5.5 hardness range), but it cannot be scratched by any other mineral.    Originally there was really no technology to cut diamonds so only rough crystals were used.  The crystals are very much like two pyramids joined together at the bases.  They were fairly attractive just as they were, though not necessarily very shiny.  Broken pieces of them were actually useful to provide sparkle as then there were sparkly broken sides. The molecules...

 Precious metals for jewelry include Gold, Silver and Platinum. They are valued for their beauty, their workability and except for silver, their immutability and resistance to environmental wear and tear.   Very early silver objects are often valued higher than gold because the silver simply does not last over time, making the pieces rarer. If you dig up a thousand-year-old sword hilt made of silver, you may still recognize it when it lays in the ground, but it may actually be a simple mush of silver oxide rather than a piece of metal .  The presence of sulfur and moisture actually speeds up the deterioration. Never try to polish VERY old silver without the advice of an expert in antiquities. I own several pieces of one thousand- and two-thousand-year-old silver.  They are a dull lead grey.  The urge to polish them is very powerful but I don't do it.    If you have silver that is in good shape with little tarnish, store it in pacific cloth bags an...

 Jewelry in general is not a good short term investment.  If you wander into a store and buy a nice diamond ring for your "I love you forever" HONEY, you had better stay together for a long time, because you will not see most of that money ever again. Jewelers are in business.  That means that they buy the gold and stones at wholesale.  They pay jewelers to design and do the work to manufacture a piece.  And they must sell the pieces at a profit.  That means that the item is only intrinsically worth a fraction of the retail cost.   Now, if your local jeweler buys a piece that is premanufactured from a  wholesaler, that wholesaler also makes a profit, taking raw materials and manufacturing the jewelry and then selling it at a profit to your local jeweler who, in turn, has to make a profit.    If your pearl necklace's pearls come from the Arabian Sea, there will be the purchase price, export duties, import duties and transportation co...

 I try not to be a shallow person, but like everyone I presume, we long for better than we have.  Since I retired it has become harder to live on the money I get each month.  But I have learned a few tricks in my ever longer life and I want to share them.  No I will not tell you how to get a million-dollar house for 30 bucks, but I can show you how to do some of the things you want to do while cutting corners and making good choices.  How do I throw a nice dinner party and do it for less.  How do I buy a nice piece of jewelry and spend a bit less.   I am not able to give you the code for a 90 percent off sale on life, but maybe I can help you stretch that budget a bit or make things last longer than normal so you can squeeze a bit more out of your income.   This is not to say that this is strictly a blog for poor people.  In life, you may have a great income.  But it is wise to cut corners even if you are making a million a yea...