You’ve been told to start your diamond shopping online before hitting the local jewelers and now you’re lost in a sea of paperwork. You have pages of GIA and EGL reports for all the diamonds you’ve seen on Bluenile strewn in front of you and you have no idea what’s the really important information here. I mean, who knows if that extra thick girdle really affects the brilliance on diamond A, it’s still a better deal than that other one which is slightly off of “ideal” in table percentage.
There’s no doubt that hundreds of diamonds; important diamonds ; are bought and sold for the most part on what a diamond certificate says. Does this mean they’re to be trusted ? What about the scandal that rocked GIA last year with the grader who was accepting money to assign good grades to some diamonds.
For the most part, the top Independent diamond grading labs have certain standards and may emphasize different aspects of diamond grading one over the other, but it all comes down to an opinion, albeit an expert opinion but an opinion nonetheless. That’s why you can get 2 different color grades on the same diamond from two different labs each with competent graders. Heck, you can even send the same stone back to the same lab 6 months later and get a slightly different report in terms of color and clarity and even a few measurements here and there.
So, I’m kicking off a series on Diamond Grading reports that will cover the ins and outs of different types of grading reports and the different labs that put out these grading reports.
First off let’s start with a list of the world’s major gemological laboratories whose products range from diamond grading documents to light performance reports
- American Gem Society Laboratories- Reputation for credibility,consistency, and thoroghness
- American Gemological laboratories- Primarily deals with colored stones
- GCAL-Gem Certification and Assurance Lab- Provides more technical certs, recent to the Grading industry
- EGL USA-European gemological laboratory- Has a mixed reputation for grading reports, not as highly regarded as GIA and AGS in terms of thoroughness, consistency, and rigor in diamond grading
- Gemex Systems- The gemex report is a different animal in that it measures and grades the light performance of a diamond directly using a spectrophotometer instead of using parameters of cut in attempting to predict performance and beauty of a diamond
- GIA Gemological Institute of America- Often considered the international benchmark for diamond grading and independent third party diamond evaluation
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