With diamond color, you're actually grading the absence of color. The less tint a diamond has, the higher it grades - and the more it costs.

Diamonds are graded on a scale from D (completely colorless) to Z (noticeable yellow or brown tint).

The thing most people don't realize is that the differences between adjacent color grades are incredibly subtle. Even trained gemologists with perfect lighting and master comparison stones are sometimes unable to identify immediate differences.

When considering diamond color and price, the real challenge is finding the color grade that looks most beautiful to you and fits within your budget. Lower diamond grades can result in large cost savings.

Natural diamonds formed under immense heat and pressure deep in the Earth - so it's normal for them to have tiny internal characteristics called inclusions. Clarity grades tell you how visible those are.

Every diamond has them and the clarity scale runs from FL (Flawless) down to I3 (Included, visible to the naked eye). This is where the identification of “eye-clean” comes in.

An eye-clean diamond has inclusions that exist on paper - they're noted on the certificate, a gemologist can see them under magnification - but to your eyes, in normal lighting, the stone looks perfectly clean.

Carat is the attribute everyone fixates on - and the one most likely to put you over your budget if you're not careful. Let's recalibrate.

To start, carat is a unit of weight, not size. Two diamonds with the same carat weight can look complete different in sizes depending on how they're cut. A well-cut 0.9ct diamond can actually look larger face-up than a poorly cut 1.0ct diamond.

If you take one thing away from this entire guide, let it be this: Cut is the single biggest factor in how beautiful a diamond looks.

This is one of the most-debated topics in diamonds business right now. Here's an honest look at both.

Lab-grown diamonds are chemically, physically, and optically identical to natural diamonds. They have the same crystal structure, hardness, and sparkle. The difference is in the origin: one formed over billions of years underground, the other was created in a lab over a few weeks. A certified gemologist would need specialized equipment to tell them apart.

So why the price gap? Jewelry quality natural diamonds are rarer and have supply chain constraints built in to keep prices artificially high. Lab-grown diamonds have scale and efficiency on their side. Neither is “fake” - they’re both real diamonds. It comes down to what you value.