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FIRE IN THE EARTH
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their
guesses ranging from half a carat to a carat-and-a-half, and 13.7 per
cent explaining they just didn't know. A few didn't know what a carat
was.
The
young man or proud parent of some graduate, off to buy a diamond, often
finds it difficult to make a selection entirely satisfactory to himself
because of his inability to compare the true values of the diamonds
offered to him from various sources. He hears of "perfect blue-white"
diamonds at one store at a fraction of the price displayed by others,
and the cry rings in his ears "Perfect Blue-White Diamonds!" or "The
Home of Perfect Diamonds." These things confuse him, mislead him,
because of unreliable jewelers or jewelers driven to desperation by the
customer's insistence upon perfection at a price that couldn't possibly
allow perfection.
The
Federal Trade Commission's requirement for calling 'a stone "perfect
blue-white" is, in effect, that it must disclose no defects under a
ten-power loupe to the trained eye. Less than 1 per cent of the
diamonds mined qualify as perfect or blue-white on that basis! Let's
go back a bit to realize fully why this is:
From
every 100 carats of gem diamond, but one carat of the output from South
African mines is included in the classifications which could produce
"blue-white perfect" diamonds in the strictest sense of the term. And
even that one gem loses at least 50 and more likely 60 per cent in the
processes of cutting and polishing. This is true of even the largest
stones. The Cullman, for instance, was sacrificed in cutting and
polishing to such an extent that it yielded only 34.5 per cent of its
great rough mass originally taken from the South African fields; the
Excelsior yielded only 37.5 per cent of its original stone.
Why? Because it was necessary to sacrifice much of the
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