Roughly one in ten thousand diamonds has meaningful color. Fewer still have it well.
Natural fancy color diamonds get their color from events during and after formation: nitrogen for yellow, boron for blue, structural distortion in the lattice for pink and red, radiation exposure for much green. None of it is common, and none of it is repeatable.
The grade is the beginning of the analysis, not the end
GIA sorts fancy color into named categories: Fancy Light, Fancy, Fancy Intense, Fancy Vivid, Fancy Deep, Fancy Dark. It is an excellent system, and it is routinely misread as a ladder from worse to better. It is not one. Vivid, Deep and Dark describe different kinds of appearance, not ranks.
Two stones in the same category can differ substantially in how they actually look, and the report language that explains why is easy to skim past:
- Modifying colors. A Fancy Intense Orangy Pink is a different stone from a Fancy Intense Pink, and the market prices the difference sharply. Some modifiers add character. Some just mute the stone.
- Color distribution. Even, or concentrated in places.
- Cut. Color diamonds are cut for color, not for brilliance. The same rough, cut two ways, produces meaningfully different color intensity.
Never buy a fancy color diamond from a description. Buy it from the stone, with someone who can tell you what you are looking at.
What I source
- Yellow. The most available of the fancy colors, and the one where quality varies most. Canary is a trade term rather than a grade; what it usually points at, Fancy Vivid Yellow with no brown modifier, is where the value sits.
- Pink. Genuinely rare, and increasingly difficult since the Argyle mine closed in 2020. Modifying colors matter enormously here.
- Blue. Boron-bearing and exceptionally scarce. Availability at any given size is limited; most acquisitions are sourced to order.
- Green, orange, violet and gray. Available periodically. Tell me what you are after and I will watch for it.
- Exceptional white. D to F color, high-performance cut, for clients who want the best colorless stone rather than the biggest one.
Every stone comes with
- A GIA grading report
- My own written assessment of how it performs and what I would flag
- Natural and untreated, always. No exceptions, and never a lab-grown stone sold as anything else.
- Insured, tracked delivery anywhere in the United States
Tell me what you are looking for
Consultations are by appointment, in person or by secure video, anywhere in the country. There is no cost and no obligation. Most first conversations are simply about narrowing down what you actually want.
Kevin Kutz, Founder and Private Jeweler · contact@kkdiamondsllc.com · (860) 996-4045