Diamonds Growing on My Family Tree

When my father got engaged in the 1920’s, he asked his father to find him a diamond because my grandfather was a New York diamond dealer.  Grandfather would be handed a diamond “wallet” by his broker, which fit comfortably into his valise containing the equivalent in today’s money of about a million dollars worth of diamonds.

Diamond boxes, or wallets, hold
diamond inventory in parcel papers

He did not have to invest any of his own money into the diamonds because they were property of the diamond firm Grandfather represented in those days and, thus, he received a percentage of every sale he made.  There were no security issues; he did not have to worry about thugs taking his diamond wallet – or worse, killing him -- as he would today.  He simply boarded a train in NYC headed toward St. Louis and stopped in every town along the way where jewelers and others in the trade purchased diamonds from him and paid cash.  It was easy for Grandfather to procure a diamond for Father when he proposed to Mother.



High quality diamond crystals showing characteristic
"trigons" on their crystal faces



I ended up with that diamond when my mother passed away.  Father said he paid 500 dollars for it back in the 20’s and it was sold to him as a “Flawless, blue-white, carat-and-a-quarter”

 My father died the year after my mother died, before I really understood the significance of a person’s roots and heritage, before I thought to really dig in depth for info about Grandfather and his highly esoteric diamond culture, his mysterious trade of black-robed Orthodox Jewish diamond brokers who shook hands, gave their Mazel and traded parcels of diamonds for promises of cash later.  The Mazel is part of a centuries-old ritual among diamond dealers mentioned in a quote in the New York Times in 1997 of Cecile Low:

“As the daughter of a diamond cleaver and trader, I learned the significance of a handshake as a child in Antwerp, Belgium. Diamond traders sealed deals and exchanged fortunes with a mere handshake and the Yiddish words ''mazel und broche'' -- ''luck and blessing.'' So much faith did, or still does, the handshake inspire, at least in the diamond trade.”

When a person buying a diamond – in the trade -- promises to purchase and pay and gets that legendary diamond-dealer handshake, it is because he or she has given his or her Mazel.  If the diamond is returned after giving a Mazel, you can be blacklisted right out of the trade.  Word spreads quicker than a forest fire if you break your Mazel.

HOW I GOT SUCKED INTO THE DIAMOND TRADE

One day in the 1970’s I decided to go to a jeweler with the diamond Grandfather secured for Father to see how much a flawless, blue-white diamond was worth.  He examined the stone in his microscope and determined it was NOT flawless.  Next he told me that the Federal Trade Commission had made it illegal to label a diamond blue-white unless it was examined by a recognized diamond-grading laboratory to be the top color grade.  Suddenly I felt an urge to have much more knowledge of diamonds than I had considering how easy it was to say just about anything about a diamond to a retail customer who was defenseless and untrained.

Mother separated from Father when I was pretty young.  She told me she was giving me her diamond and would keep it in a safe place for me since she no longer wished to wear it.  At that time, as near as I have been able to determine, the 500-dollar diamond had increased in value to about 3 thousand, a six-fold increase in 4 decades.  When I became a student of gemology in the late 70’s we began a serious period of inflation and its value soared to 20 thousand, 40 times what Father paid for it.

I sought to build a time-bridge between myself and Grandfather by studying diamonds and colored gemstones at the Gemological Institute of America which was located in Santa Monica then.  I wanted to understand how Mother’s diamond could have been labeled as the perfect color when it was not and the perfect clarity when it was not.  I learned that gemology was considered a trivial science until after the Second World War when it occurred to many jewelers that they were facing stiff competition from unscrupulous business counterparts who took full advantage of the esoteric nature of the diamond business and gave “optimistic” grades to diamonds that most people who were experts in the trade would disagree with, grades that made the unscrupulous ones much more profit.

INSTITUTIONS OF DIAMOND GRADING SPRANG UP TO PROTECT CONSUMERS

By the unscrupulous ones, the blue-white color grade was given to diamonds very generously.  TOO generously.  By those in the know, the perfectly white diamond was considered extremely rare, yet by the unscrupulous peddlers, all of their diamonds were blue-white.  It was an attempt to create some form of standardized diamond grading that would change diamonds from an obscure, unregulated business to a transparent one in which diamonds could be “certified” to be a certain color and clarity.  This was important because increases in color and clarity in diamonds brought disproportionately higher prices per unit.

Here is the GIA diamond COLOR GRADING scale now used all over the world:

The letter “D” was used as the top color grade leaving A, B and C for grading unpolished, rough diamonds. “Z” was used as the “bottom” of the color scale.  Diamonds that have more color than Z color diamonds are considered “Fancy Color” diamonds.  After Z, the price of diamonds begins to go up as there is more and more color in the stone.  D color is one of three grades of  “Colorlessness”.  This was one of the things that made me study gemology: that hard scientists have left such an imprint on the grading system that you can feel the presence of hair-splitting.  So, D, E and F color are the whitest colors diamonds come in, the rarest of the colors.  (My mother’s diamond turned out to be an F color.)

The purity of a diamond, also called the clarity of a diamond, is determined correctly only by experienced people who understand the nature of internal and external flaws in diamonds.  Gary Roskin, one of the most famous of America’s gemologists, was a diamond grader at the Gemological Institute of America when he wrote a book about diamond grading that included photographs of the internal characteristics of several diamonds, a book that can be used as a guide for determining the clarity grade of a diamond.  It is about how many inclusions, grain patterns, percussion marks, clouds, stress, crystals of other material (such as ruby), knotted internal crystals and other such things found in diamonds, how close to the edges (where prongs may crack a diamond in a weak area), and how visible they are under 10 power magnification. 

Here is the GIA CLARITY GRADING scale for diamonds:

If an expert using 10 power magnification cannot see ANYTHING within the diamond, it is labeled INTERNALLY FLAWLESS.  If this is true and there is NOTHING visible on the surface either, it is given the highest grade of all: FLAWLESS.  Below the flawless grade are VVS, VS, SI and I grades

--There is a VVS-1 and a VVS-2 (meaning two grades of very, very slightly imperfect)
--There is a VS-1 and a VS-2 (meaning two grades of very slightly imperfect)
--There is an SI-1 and an SI-2 (meaning two grades of slightly imperfect)
--There are three grades of Imperfect: I-1, I-2, and I-3

(My mother’s diamond is an F color, VS-1 clarity, not a flawless blue-white)

THE ADVENT OF SCIENCE

Until scientists got involved in diamond grading, it was not possible to make an accurate determination of a diamond’s grade.  With the presence of the gemological institutes there are standards for grading.  With the presence of the American Gem Society there is a profession to join that stands for ethics in the jewelry industry.

It would be, then, fair to say, that a person buying a diamond with a certificate from the most reputable grading labs can be confident of the quality analysis of 3 of the 4-c’s of diamond grading: 1) color graded against a standard color scale,  2) clarity graded against a standard of clarity-grading parameters and 3) weighed electronically to the thousandth of a carat. (A carat is a unit of weight used for gemstones of all kinds. It is derived from the ancient practice of putting stones on a scale and using carob beans as counterbalance to determine weight.)

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE QUALITY OF CUTTING

I said 3 of the 4.  Until recently, there was no quality analysis done on number 4, the CUTTING of a diamond.  Tiffany and Company stated in their brochures in the 1970’s that the most important C of the 4 (color, clarity, carat, cut), the one that made the most difference in the beauty of a diamond was the quality of its cutting. For the first 500 years of diamond cutting, the quality of cutting was largely overlooked in the diamond cutting industry in favor of using the cutter’s art to save weight.

Let’s look at the photo of the diamond crystals again:

The pieces of gem diamond rough in the photo are perfect specimens of octahedral crystallization (two pyramids: one on top and one on bottom).  Most diamond crystals do not form perfectly like these. To cut a diamond you would see in a ring from crystals like these, you would saw off about 2/3 of the top part to make a second diamond (known as a “toppie” in the diamond cutting trade) and cut the bottom piece into your main stone shedding 30 to 50 percent of the crystal weight depending on how close to “ideal” you want the cut to be.

Each diamond crystal costs thousands of dollars in the higher color and clarity grades. Every point of weight lost in cutting is profit disappearing into the air as diamond dust. (A “point” is 1/100 of a carat—like pennies to dollars are points to carats).  The diamond cutter in most factories is a slave to the profit-at-all-costs philosophy. The further you drift from ideal cutting standards, the more you sacrifice the beauty a diamond can give you.  The difference in the appearance of a poorly cut diamond and a well cut one can be observed from the other side of a restaurant.  Unless you can charge more for a well-cut diamond, the lost weight in ideal cutting prohibits the accounting divisions of large diamond cutting firms from allowing anything other than weight-saving techniques.

This is why it took a revolution in this kind of thinking to begin a movement that led to today’s diamonds which are infinitely superior in their cutting to the standard, even superior to those far above standard in the days I studied at the Gemological Institute of America.  I went far beyond just getting my “Sheepskin” from GIA.  I met the man in Tokyo who began the revolution with his Asian tenacity in pursuit of the truth and beauty. Mr. Tamura.



Mr. Tamura of Tokyo, inventor
of the world-famous
EightStar diamond



His story is an amazing one, one that involves me in the role of rocking the boat in the diamond industry of the Western world, one that allowed me to become one of the influential voices in the revolution.  I owned the diamond factory in the United States that the American Gem Society visited to “catch up” to the huge advances we made in the quality of diamond cutting.

I would like to share the story with you in increments. In my next blog I will take you deeper into the inner-workings of the diamond world and show you how I caused serious friction by challenging diamond cutters and dealers to concentrate on the quality of cutting so the consumer could get the benefit of a diamond’s beauty instead of a buying yet another testimonial to the importance of profit over beauty.