Understanding Carats

It is understood that the cut of a diamond is the most important factor when it comes to desirability of a diamond, but when it comes to prices carats take the lead. A carat is actually the weight of the diamond. The larger the carat, the harder that diamond is to find, therefore, more expensive. The tricky thing about carats is that they are priced by adding the carats together. For an example, for a three carat diamond, they take the price of 1 carat and times in by 3 in order to make the price for a three carat diamond. Sounds a little peculiar, but fact is that the heavier weighted diamonds are much more difficult to find. One problem with larger carat diamonds is that sometimes jewelers cannot cut it in the most fashionable way because large portions of the diamond would be wasted. For an example, if you wanted a pear shaped 6-carat diamond, the jeweler would have a very difficult time cutting the diamond because he would be wasting a large portion of the diamond. Instead, larger carat diamonds are usually found square cut or princess cut, therefore most of the diamond is in tact. Another way jewelers talk about diamonds is in points. For an example if you have a .50 carat diamond, a jeweler would say it’s a 50 point diamond. It is just easier than saying .50 carat. In order to understand exactly the weight of diamonds, there is a chart used unanimously by all diamond jewelers. One carat is equivalent to 200 milligrams or 100 points. Finding the right diamond is no easy task, but understanding carats makes it much easier to narrow down the large selection.