The fourth 'C' or Carat weight

 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 large jump. Very few good stones over one carat are found each year.  Stones over one carat are quite rare so the jump is large.  After that stones become rarer and rarer as they get bigger.

  

You can never say that diamonds are worth 1000 dollars a carat for example.  There is not a regular price.  A ten-carat stone may be a million dollars.  A 100-carat stone might be 20 million.  These are invented prices, but I just need you to understand that even perfectly cut, D color, flawless stones do not have a smooth scale that will allow you to predict prices based on the size.


Some years ago I put together a rather large piece of jewelry.  I was using older stones.  After a while, I ran out of old stones from my regular sources.  I called a pawn broker and asked if any were available.  The size stone I needed was just below one of those "big jump" sizes.  I mentioned the price to the guy and he rather startled me when he said..."Yeah...all our diamonds are xxxx a carat no matter what the size".


Poorly cut stones are sometimes an effort to save as much material as possible to get the price up.  They may also not facet the girdle to save weight even if the difference would be miniscule. Of course, they also save labor by not faceting the girdle.


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