Colored Diamonds: All Diamonds Have Color

The colours of diamonds

Though a structurally flawless and chemically pure diamond will have no color and be perfectly transparent, the reality is that nearly all gem-sized diamonds are flawed in some way and are not one hundred percent transparent. With this knowledge it’s easy to see why nearly all diamonds are colored diamonds.

Of course there are also diamonds with such intense color that the coloring is thought to enhance rather than detract from the diamond. Where yellow tinged diamonds are considered unattractive, such hues as pink or blue are thought to make a diamond more attractive.

The Hope Diamond is probably the most well known blue colored diamond and there is of course the legend of the Hope Diamond. The famous blue Hope Diamond, weighing 44.52 carats, is said to be very unlucky for its owner.

It is named after a former owner, Henry Philip Hope. The Hope Diamond is now on permanent display in the Smithsonian Institution.

This great blue diamond is possibly the most notorious gem in history and is supposedly cursed. The Hope was found in India and the 112-carat gem was brought to France in the 17th century. 

The Hope Diamond Curse came about after a thief was reported to have stolen the diamond from the eye of the Hindu goddess Sita who was the wife of Rama.

Tavernier who brought the gem to France then sold it to Louis XIV who cut it into a 67-carat heart-shaped stone and named it the Blue Diamond of the Crown. Tavernier is reputed to have been killed by wild dogs on his next trip to India.

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette inherited the French Blue, as it was popularly called and then in 1792 they were executed and the French Blue diamond was stolen from the Garde-Meuble along with almost all of the French crown jewels.

The Blue Diamond of the Crown was not recovered again in this state....until in 1831 a 44.5-carat deep blue diamond appeared in London.

Henry Hope bought the diamond and ever since then it has been known as the Hope diamond.  Many gem experts agree that this was most likely the French Blue which had been rrecut to conceal its original identity

Later in its life an Eastern European royal member gave it to an actress but later shot and killed her. Then a Greek owner and his family fell to their deaths over a steep cliff in a car accident. Next was a Turkish sultan named Hamid II who had only owned the gem for a short time before he was toppled from the throne in 1910

Lastly the socialite Evalyn McLean bought the Hope diamond in 1911 and shortly thereafter her son was killed in another car accident whilst her husband died a short time after in a mental institution. Her daughter later died as well.

When Mrs. McLean died in 1947 a famous New York jeweler named Harry Winston bought her jewels which included the now infamous Hope diamond and gave the gem to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C to look after ever.

Of all colored diamonds, red diamonds are the rarest type of all.

Colored diamonds occur in a rather restricted range of color. These include: white, steel grey, yellow, orange, blue, red, green, purple, pink and even brown and black. The coloration is caused by structural defects and interstitial impurities. Light is refracted differently through these flaws and results in different colored diamonds.

The gemological Institute of America uses a ‘D’ to ‘Z’ scale for grading the color ‘white’ diamonds, where ‘Z’ is yellow and ‘D’ is colorless.

Diamonds.com have an excellent education centre which offers very comprehensive information about all kinds of diamonds and gems

The color grade scale is as follows:

• colorless: D, E, F
• near colorless: G, H, I, J
• faint yellow or brown: K, L, M
• very light yellow or brown: N, O, P, Q, R
• light yellow or brown: S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z

This is the color scale for brown diamonds with no secondary colors.

There are essentially 7 degrees of color intensity for brown.

Many other international diamond grading organizations have also decided to use the Gemological Institute of America’s color scale for grading diamonds.

So when do diamonds qualify as colored diamonds, per se? When a diamond is being graded and the color grade is beyond a ‘Z’ rating it is considered to be a colored diamond. These colored diamonds are then graded by a different set of guidelines similar to those used for colored gemstones, such as emeralds, rubies and sapphires.

For the most part, colored diamonds are graded the same as colorless diamonds with regard to clarity and other features. Interestingly, some diamonds have enough color to be graded low as a diamond but very high as a general colored gemstone.