The diamond

My parents had long ago prepared 3 diamonds for each of the 3 kids. When I told my mom the P was near, she offered the diamond to kyzen8, but he gracefully declined because he wanted to buy it himself. Not wanting to disappoint, kyzen8 showed me some choices on the blue nile site and asked for my input. At that point, I was more of a newbie than he was. He already knew the 4 Cs and more. We started narrowing down our choices. Pink diamond? Too expensive. Side diamonds? Too gaudy. And then I found pricescope.com, the weddingbee equivalent of the diamond world. Unfortunately for kyzen8, I got a little carried away (aka obsessed). But at this point, he already got me involved and there was no turning back. I was going to pick out the perfect diamond with the perfect setting.

My criteria were 1.5+ size, hearts&arrows cut, D color, VS2+ clarity. Medium blue fluorescence was acceptable. After scouring blue nile, goodoldgold, exceldiamonds, and numerous other sites for weeks, it came down to 2 diamonds from blue nile. They both looked excellent on paper. How would I pick? Heck, just buy both of them! And that's what we did. The only major difference between these two is the size (1.61 on the left vs 1.69 on the right) and price. Armed with a new hearts and arrows viewer and a complete diamond toolkit, I set out to take pictures of both diamonds to show the pricescoper experts and compare:

Actual image top down. You can see the arrows:


Hearts from the H&A viewer:


Arrows from the H&A viewer:


Asset/ideal scope image:


Honestly, I couldn't tell much of a difference with my bare naked eye when the diamonds were side by side. I took the babies inside, outside, bright sunlight, shadows, home depot (<-- crazy girl walking around with diamonds), you name it. They both shined like crazy!

I felt emotionally attached to the 1.61 because it had lots of 1s and 8s in its price (I was born on the 18th in 81, and 18 is a good number in Chinese culture). Also, 1.61 had a mirrored inclusion that reflected all the way around when you look into the diamond at a specific angle with a magnifier. In the diamond world, this was a bad quality to have. But it reminded me of the mole I have to the left of my mouth. It also didn't hurt that it was slightly cheaper. So yes, 1.61 seemed like the reasonable choice.

But then we took the 2 diamonds to an appraisor in Los Angeles. Within the first 15 minutes, he compared the diamonds side by side. The 1.69 won out with respect to clarity (though both graded at VS2, he said the 1.69 was more like a VS1, and that reflector inclusion was confirmed to be "bad"). 1.69 also won out in color and had less fluorescence (medium blue is actually not a bad quality at all but on paper, less is better).

Since we were paying a lot of money for these diamonds, I wanted the best bang for the buck. I figured I wouldn't be admiring the inclusion every day anyway, and it's not like I needed that special birthmark for identity purposes. Both diamonds have blue nile inscriptions and their numbers etched into the girdle anyway.

And so we picked the 1.69!