How To Tell If A Diamond Is Real

imaginediamonds.com/diamond.html -- Diamonds were recently revealed to be the most popular category of jewelry. This doesn’t surprise me—and probably doesn’t surprise you either—as it’s easy to reasonably conclude that the stone most often used in engagement and anniversary jewelry would be the most popular. Indeed diamonds are everywhere. No other stone in my gemology training got an entire unit devoted to it, no other stone will take up as much space in jewelry store cases, and no other stone will ever represent a bigger percentage of online gemstone and jewelry sales. I suppose it’s part tradition (diamonds are simply “the thing” to buy), part beauty (no other gemstone sparkles in quite the same way), and part practicality (the diamond is the hardest and most durable substance we have to work with, and as such, the least likely to sustain damage). The diamond is simply the top, and I can’t see anything ever coming along that will change that.

The diamond is so popular that there are many other gemstones out there that try to imitate it. Some of these are natural stones that just happen to also be colorless (things like colorless spinel, topaz, or quartz, for example), and some are manmade, in that they’ve been created for the sole purpose of imitating diamonds (things like cubic zirconia, gadolinium gallium garnet, and yttrium aluminum garnet, for example). This second group, the manmade imitations, is the one you’re far more likely to encounter, and while it can seem frustrating and unfair that we have to worry about sifting through “real” or “fake” when it comes to our search for diamond jewelry, when you think about what we’ve just described—the popularity of the diamond—it’s no wonder that people so often seek to imitate it. After all, if you can pass something off as a diamond—perhaps the most valuable gemstone on earth—then why wouldn’t you? So the question for all of us then becomes this: How do you tell if a diamond is real? Considering the exponential difference in price between a diamond and its imitators, being able to make sure you are getting what you are paying for becomes crucial.

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