Diamond Education

Diamonds are the cornerstone of a fair fraction of jewelry and jewelry appraisals, especially engagement rings. Often the diamond is sold separately from the ring for this reason.

Even if we’re looking at a style of setting where the focus is on some other type of gem, there are often smaller and remarkably expensive diamonds on the sides. There’s quite a bit of educational content online about diamonds and I’ll try not to replicate too much here that can easily be found elsewhere. Look at www.gia.edu, www.ags.org and www.pricescope.com for guides and tutorials along with the articles here.

In most cases, major diamonds are purchased separately from the rest of the ring, which is called the semi-mount. This system is for the benefit of both the jeweler and the customer. For you it means that the center diamond can be independently examined for damage, weighed, and lab graded for various attributes that price the stone. In nearly every case, I recommend doing this.

For the jeweler it means less inventory is needed to end up with exactly what the buyer wants. You pick a diamond, you pick a ring, and they assemble them in the shop. It’s easy, it’s fast, and they have the image of far more inventory. For Internet based vendors it’s even more important. They are almost certainly buying the mounting and the center diamond from two different sources. It will require assembly afterword, along with a resizing and possibly other modifications that you need. They couldn’t stock it as an assembled item, even if they wanted to.