CAN DIAMONDS BE IDENTICAL?

Can diamonds be identical?

Short and sweet:

NO!

You would think with all the billions and billions of diamonds on the face of the earth, that you’d be able to find a couple that were identical.

I mean, some people are born identical twins, right?

So why not diamonds?

I’ll tell you why:

Nature

When things are born and made in nature, nothing is perfect, and nothing is identical.

You have to take into consideration the surrounding minerals, irons, climate, and chemicals in the earth. The point of crystallization and the melting temperatures involved with nature, makes everything erratic and entirely unstable and unique.

Diamonds are made and crystallized with inclusions and color from the surrounding area. Their composition is individual and you will never see another exact diamond like it again.

Diamonds are truly one-of-a-kind.

That’s why the 4 C’s are so difficult to master. With every single diamond being different, it’s almost impossible to put them into separate categories for grading. Every diamond has to be inspected under tight scrutiny, technology, and nit picked for every attribute, detail and identifying characteristic.

It all comes down to opinion

In the end, it all comes down to the grader’s opinion. They judge the quality, like color and clarity. They compare them to master stones and shift them into appropriate grades.

But it’s all done on an individual process. One diamond after another. There is no exact rules of thumb. They can only strive for the best possible rating for that particular stone.

This is why getting a matched pair of diamond stud earrings is so difficult. If you view one earring under a microscope, and then view the other earring under 10x magnification, you’ll see a difference in inclusions with size, quantity and placement.

You may even see a difference in color between them.

No two diamonds will ever truly look alike.

The jewelers do their best to match them. They first start out by matching the mm size. Diamond earrings need to match in size more than anything. Carat weights between them will usually vary a little. The eye can detect differences in mm width, but not within a couple of points. After all, you don’t want one earring to look bigger than the other, do you?

Match color and clarity

The jewelers then go on to match color and clarity last. It’s not an easy process. And that’s with only 2 diamonds. If you’re dealing with a piece of jewelry that has lots of matching stones (like a cluster ring)… Good luck! Odds are, a couple of them will look visibly different.

A really good example would be a diamond tennis bracelet. A tennis bracelet with 72 matching diamonds no doubt… is a long, time consuming job to match up all those stones for size, color and clarity. But in the end, if they look similar enough, then the jeweler did their job well.

Diamonds may never be identical, but with a careful eye, and a little patience, you can get a pretty close match.

And if the color and clarity look good as well, then the uniqueness of the diamond won’t matter much.

It’s more about the sparkle and shine and beauty of the stone.

And that’s something we can all identify with.

Cheers! :)