Fancy colors

Fancy color diamonds are formed just like every other natural diamond on the planet, an assembly of carbon in a crystallized structure through millions or even billions of years beneath the earth surface.

They get their breathtaking color by being exposed during its formation to different types of elements that got absorbed into the structure of the stone.

For example, a blue diamond is a result of boron presence and yellow by nitrogen-the bigger the exposure, the deeper the color.

The magnificent pink and brown diamonds both get their colour from deformation of the crystal structure caused by stress during formation. Many orange diamonds get their colour from nitrogen atoms clustered together in a particular way, What a fantastic mystery!

Unlike in colorless diamonds where all 4C’s (carat, clarity, color and cut) have equal importance to the overall value, In the fancy color market one aspect is far more significant than others and that’s the quality of the diamonds color.

With a wide range of spectacular colors as the rainbow’s: pink, purple, green, blue, and red are considered extremely rare and highly expensive, the more common ones are yellow and brown.

 

 

Most of diamonds found are not single and pure color but a combination of two or more colors altogether in one stone.

In the diamonds industry rarity equals value-the rarer and purer the color is, combined with its intensity, the higher its worth.

 

 

The gemological Institute of America (GIA) formed an eight stages scale to determine the intensity levels with fancy color, it’s the most common system around the world nowadays: faint, very light, light, fancy light, fancy, fancy intense, fancy vivid, and fancy deep.

Higher intensity level means there is more actual color inside the stone, therefore it gets a higher price tag.

Value can also be affected by current supply and demand.

 

 

With mining data of only 1 out of 10,000 carats displaying fancy color, and only 1 in 25,000 carats showing intense colors, we can understand why in a purchase color and intensity has a higher significance over other factors of the 4C’s, such as clarity.

 

 

Cover photo by Christie’s.