Know Your Fine Jewellery – Gemstone Assessment Tips

Considering gemstones as something to buy for either yourself or someone you love is not generally something that can be taken lightly. These stones are rare, expertly sourced, graded, cut and placed in fine jewellery and therefore expensive. When on the lookout for your ideal gemstone, you need to be realistic about your finances, and what you are able to buy. Before you set out it is a good idea to have a good idea of what type of gemstone you are seeking.

Searching for gemstones in the style of jewellery you most want can be a very difficult and often intimidating experience. The sheer quantity of stones on sale today is mesmerising. Combine that with the fact that assessing their quality and true worth can often be very difficult, and you can very quickly end up buying the wrong thing.

Gemstone quality can be quickly and effectively assessed on these 4 factors, the 4 Cs: colour, clarity, cut and carat.

Colour

Rather obviously, this refers to the colour of the gemstone. Typically, the stronger and more vibrant the colour throughout the stone, the more beautiful and desirable they are, increasing the stone’s cost. Jewellers tend to refer to the strength of colour as “intensity”.

If the colour of a stone is rare, this can also increase the cost significantly. A good example of this is golden-pink topaz (also known as Imperial Topaz) that tends to be more expensive than blue topaz, simply owing to its rarity.

Clarity

This term refers to the quantity of “inclusions” or impurities found in a gemstone. When you are able to see straight through a gemstone’s bottom facets (known as the pavilion) the stone can be considered clear. Inclusions are the result of other minerals trapped within the gemstone as it formed. Cracks in the stone also lower clarity.

In general, the clearer a stone is the more expensive it becomes. Some of the best examples of clarity translate into a lot of reflected light – a highly desirable trait.

Cut

This is a very important aspect of a gemstone. More often than not the cut is badly done, particularly with expensive stones. Cuts that are considered of a high quality show strong symmetry, beautiful proportions and perfect polishing. The stone’s natural beauty is ideally amplified by the jeweller’s cuts.

Carat

In the world of gemstones size really does matter. If all other factors are equal, an increase in size increases the stone’s worth. Wholesale trades of gemstones often use size, known as a carat. Something to remember is that not only does the price increase as the number of carats increase, but each carat increases in worth due to the rarity attributed to large sized stones. Amethyst is commonly found at a large size, and so does not have a carat size that increases at a more exponential rate as stone size increases. On the other hand, rubies are rarely found at a carat of 5 or more.

Although you probably need to study stones for a while to get used to assessing them on these aforementioned points, it does help to know this information, if nothing else to let the jeweller know you don’t buy anything.