Fancy Color Diamonds

If you’re out there looking for the best fancy color diamond for your money, then please contact me and let me know your budget and what you’re looking for. I’ll sift through the available inventory online and send you a list of 4 or 5 suggested stones to choose from that fit your needs the best. Unlike the other sites, I’m not looking to sell you anything – my advice is objective and in your best interest. The service is free, and there is absolutely no commitment to buy any of my suggestions. You have nothing to lose!

Table of Contents

Introduction

Natural vs. Treated Color

The Four Cs of Fancy Color

Fancy Color Grading

How to Buy Fancy Color Diamonds

Introduction

First off, lets start with the basics. Most of you probably already know that there is a scale of diamond color from D to Z.  D, of course, is completely colorless while Z is heavily tinted with yellow.  But all along that scale from D to Z, the discusion is still about what are categorized as “white diamonds.”  A Z color diamond is a heavily yellow tinted white diamond.

The world of diamonds, though, is not limited to this scale.  Diamonds falling off this scale are commonly called “Fancy Color Diamonds” or “Fancy Diamonds.”  Diamonds can either fall off this scale because they’re tinted with a shade other than yellow, or because the yellow color inside the diamond is so strong that the diamond is no longer considered a tinted white diamond, but rather a full fledged yellow diamond.

Diamonds can come in a variety of colors.  The chart below (from Page 12 of “Forever Brilliant: The Aurora Collection of Colored Diamonds”) is an excellent graphical display of the variety of colors in which diamonds can be found.

Each of the major colors has a different level of rareness (and of course the price level reflects that rarity).

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Natural Fancy Color Diamonds vs. Treated Color Diamonds

An important distinction must be made here before we continue with our introduction of fancy color diamonds.  When shopping for fancy color diamonds, it’s crucial that you buy from a reputable dealer and verify that the diamond you are interested in is a natural fancy color diamond.  One of the most common lab treatments performed on diamonds is taking cheap brown-colored diamonds and treating them with high pressure and high temperature in order to change their color to a wide variety of copies of natural fancy diamond colors.  If you do buy these diamonds, know that they are much cheaper than natural fancy colors precisely because they are created from the cheapest of the cheap diamonds.  Also, it’s fairly easy to tell the difference between a natural fancy color diamond and a treated colored diamond.  The saturation of color in the treated diamonds is so strong that most of them look like semi-precious colored gems.

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The Four Cs of Fancy Color Diamonds

Buyers of white diamonds are always taught that the most important of the “Four Cs” is diamond Cut quality (as I do on this site).  The reason is simple – white diamonds are treasured precisely because of their radiance and fiery brilliance and it is the diamond’s cut quality that determines, more than any other factor, just how brilliant the diamond is.

Not so with Fancy Color Diamonds.  In the Fancy Color market, only one thing matters – the quality of the diamond’s color.  So, in reality, cut is important for Fancy Colors.  But it’s a cut that brings out the stone’s color which matters, and not the cut which maximizes symmetry and light return.  And most often, these two approaches are diametrically opposed.  Flipping through the book “Forever Brilliant: The Aurora Collection of Colored Diamonds,” one sees many diamonds with cuts that would simply be unsaleable on a regular white diamond.  One finds oodles of open culets, an abundance of asymmetry, and loads of large tables

Similar is the case with diamond clarity.  In a white diamond, one should be very careful to only buy a diamond whose inclusions are clean to the naked eye.

Take a look at these stones that are a part of the “Aurora Collection” as referenced in the above mentioned book.  Keep in mind that the Aurora is one of the most prestigious collections of fancy color diamonds in the world.  If any of these stones were white, I wouldn’t be able to recommend purchasing it.

As you can see in these pictures, the stones are still quite beautiful – the inclusions don’t really detract from the beauty of the diamond’s color.  These would be low quality and very cheap indeed had they been white diamonds.

And of course, the “fifth C” – Cost – is also completely different between white and fancy color diamonds.  As I explain in my article “Truth about Diamond Prices,” regular white certified diamond prices are all grounded in the Rapaport price list.  What this means is that for white diamonds, the underlying fundamental basis for a diamond’s price is universally agreed upon between buyers and sellers.  All that is negotiated is the percent discount below (or in rare occasions, above) the Rapaport list price.

Such is not the case with fancy color diamonds.  There is no price list.  Prices are established the old fashioned way – through a fluid market reaching an equilibrium between buyers and sellers.  Because of this difference, many people with little to no real diamond knowledge have entered the white diamond market in the past 10 years – many of them quite successfully.  After all, when the spread between buying and selling is simply a matter of a few percentage points, and prices are relatively stable and fixed, it’s not hard to learn at what price to buy and at what price to sell.  But throw a novice into the fancy color diamond market, and he’ll get killed in a matter of days.  Each stone has its own value that is determined by so many factors (shape, certified color, actual color, modifying colors, size, clarity, etc) that pricing fancy colors is more of an art form than anything else.

It follows, then, that it is crucial that you make sure to buy your fancy color diamond from a company with a verified expertise in the fancy color market – otherwise, you are sure to pay far more for your diamond than you should be.

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How is Diamond Fancy Color Graded?

Fancy diamond color is graded along three different axes.  They are hue (the actual color  - i.e., red, blue, green, or anything in between), tone (the relative lightness or darkness of the color), and saturation (how strong or weak the color is).

Hue is most often described as a combination of two or more colors.  When the first color is listed in an adjective form and the second color in a noun form (ie, Orangy Yellow), the first color is the modifying color and the second color is the primary color.  In this example, the stone is primarily yellow with a slight orangy tint.  Occasionally, color is a 50/50 split between two hues.  In such a case, the color will be listed as two nouns (ie, Orange Yellow).  Stones with pure colors without any modifiers are generally considered more rare and therefore more valuable.  According the the GIA, there are only four publicly known pure Fancy Red (without any modifying colors) diamonds in existence in the world.

People often mistakenly believe that there is one axis of color strength in which fancy color is graded – Fancy Light, Fancy, Fancy Intense, and Fancy Vivid.  This is a very simplistic way to view things, and is mostly true only in reference to Yellow Diamonds.

The charts presented here graphically represent the entire universe of fancy diamond color.  The North-South Pole represents Tone.  Going around the circumference of this globe represents changes in Hue.  And finally, distance from the center of the globe represents the color’s saturation.

Fancy Light implies a stone with both weak saturation and a light tone.  Fancy implies a stone with either a slightly darker tone, or a slightly stronger saturation, and perhaps both.  For colors that are best displayed in a lighter tone (ie, colors that are generally “brighter”) such as yellow, and pink, Fancy Intense implies a relatively lighter tone with a significantly stronger saturation.  Fancy Vivid also implies a relatively ligher tone, yet coupled with the strongest possible saturation.  For “darker” colors such as blue, Fancy Vivid can only refer to diamond with a fully saturated darker blue.

With other hues, lighter or darker tones take on completely new names.  In general, the darkest tone of a color will full saturation is usually called “Fancy Deep.”  When Fancy Deep Pink gets just a bit more dark and a bit more saturated, it becomes Fancy Red.  Darker yellows become modified with the “Brown” hue, and darker Blue or Green often becomes “Grayish.”

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How to Buy Fancy Color Diamonds

In the not too distant past, people looking to buy fancy color diamonds really only had one way to buy them.  Until recently, these precious and rare diamonds were sold only through the highest end retailers throughout the world.  Tiffany and Graff are but to name a few.

The problem with these high-end stores, as is the problem with most bricks-and-mortar jewelry stores of the classic mold, is that their profit margins much be exceptionally high in order to offset their very high cost of maintaining a very expensive inventory.  All of this is discussed in my article entitled Truth About James Allen & Blue Nile.

But with fancy colors, it’s even worse.  You see, with white diamonds, all it takes is a quick internet search to quickly discover what a competitive price is for any given carat weight, color and clarity.  Not so with Fancy Colors.   With the exception, perhaps, of fancy yellow diamonds, every fancy color diamond is completely unique.  So it’s very difficult to compare prices between different stones.  But furthermore, and this is the crucial point, there is very little competition in the fancy color diamond market.  For ever 100 wholesale white diamond vendors, there might be 1 or 2 wholesale fancy diamond vendors.  And for every 1,000 retail white diamond stores, there might be 1 or 2 stores that carry fancy color diamonds.

So this utter lack of competition and basis of comparison of prices leads most dealers of fancy color diamonds to greatly inflate their prices.  It is therefore of utmost importance that you do your due diligence thoroughly about whatever source you plan on buying a fancy color diamond from.

Nowadays, however, the fancy color diamond buyer has a bit of an easier time.  In the last few years, there have arisen a small number of online stores selling fancy colors.  Most of them are run by reputable wholesale operations that specialize exclusively in fancy color diamonds.   Most of these, unfortunately, fall short of what you’d like to see from a full service online diamond vendor.  There is one exception, though.  That is Leibish & Co. at www.fancydiamonds.net.

Leibish Polnauer is one of these colorful (pun intended) figures that everyone in the exclusive Israel Diamond Bourse knows and loves.   Leibish & Co. is the most highly respected fancy color dealer in Israel, and one of the best in the world.   Leibish is the guy everyone in Israel goes to when they need a hard to find fancy color diamond at a great price.

But not only is Leibish & Co. well known and respected throughout the diamond market in Israel.  They are one of the primary suppliers of some of the largest and biggest names in the high-end luxury retail world.  Additionally, they supply most of the wholesale color diamonds dealers in the world.  Leibish & Co. is as high up on the supply ladder you can go in the fancy color diamond market.

A number of years ago, they launched their website with the intent on it being a convenient way for their wholesale clients (retail stores, other dealers, major collectors, etc) to peruse their inventory.  Suddenly, the response from regular clients was overwhelming, so they decided to open their site to the public.  As they say, the rest is history.

www.fancydiamonds.net has simply become the premier site on the internet for buying fancy color diamonds.  The beauty of fancydiamonds.net is that they do not discriminate between their wholesale and retail clients.  Everyone receives the same price.  So when you shop at Leibish & Co, you get a full service retail experience, yet you get the absolute lowest prices on fancy color diamonds in the world.

There is simply no other internet site, or retail store, than can compare with what Leibish & Co has to offer.

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