11 Apr 2009

My new best friend!

A diamond came to live with me today. The most beautiful diamond I've ever seen - or at least that I've ever seen close up. It's a brilliant cut solitaire on a platinum ring with a plain, modern claw mounting. It's almost colourless and sparkles like moonlight on water.

As I type it throws multicoloured flashes of light through the air and if that's not an incentive to keep writing I don't know what is!

I learned a lot about diamonds after we first spoke with our jeweller; about the four Cs, Carat, Cut, Colour and Clarity. I learned how colour is notated for diamonds - D is the most colourless and therefore most valuable; mine is a G. Carat is, as everyone knows, the size of the diamond - 1 carat is 0.2 grams; mine is 1.39 carat. Cut is what gives the diamond its brilliance; the facets that are cut on the surface of the diamond reflect the light back and forth within the gem. Finally, clarity of the stone is determined by the amount of faults or marks there are within the stone, called inclusions. Almost all diamonds have some sort of mark within them, many not able to be seen by the naked eye; the fewer there are, the more valuable the diamond.

My diamond has a very few small inclusions, but to balance that, the colour is at the top end of the scale. It's a good balance I think.

Never in a million years would I have been able to afford a diamond such as the one that's come to live with me. To just try something like it on in a jeweller's store would have been something I'd never have considered.

So to those thieves who burgled our home a couple of months ago and took every single piece of jewellery I had, including the rings my mother left me when she died last year, I say don't bother coming back; you won't find anything there.