Posts By: Al Broberg

The Lucara Diamond Corporation has made most of the discoveries of very large rough diamonds in recent years at their Karowe mine in Africa. Now they have made their mark on the diamond industry in a new way with the introduction of their Clara Diamond Solutions System. Since the founding of the modern diamond industry,… Read more »

For decades, Hollywood starlets have worn jewelry that they did not own to the Oscars and other high profile events. This jewelry is lent to them by famous jewelry artisans because what the starlets wear gets lots of coverage on TV and in magazines. One of the newest and most interesting trends in the jewelry… Read more »

Last summer the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) revised its guidelines regarding the marketing of diamonds in ways that were widely interpreted as a victory for the lab grown diamond industry. The previous guidelines had defined a diamond as a “natural” product. The new guides define a diamond simply as “a mineral consisting essentially of pure… Read more »

As any follower of this blog or the Hull Loan System facebook page knows, diamonds gown in a laboratory have improved in size and quality enough to be used in jewelry and are making inroads into the retail jewelry sector.  Some retailers, such as Wedding Day, have started stocking and selling lab grown diamonds almost… Read more »

A new research paper by the Rapaport Group provides a good overview of the current state of the diamond market. As late as the early 1990s, the Debeers Company controlled about 80% of the rough diamonds coming into the diamond pipeline. They used that control of diamond supply to maintain stable and modestly increasing diamond… Read more »

Since the advent of modern diamond grading about 80 years ago, gemological laboratories have graded diamonds for carat weight, cut, color and clarity using some tools but applying human judgments. Scales, of course, were used to determine carat weight. But loupes, microscopes, millimeter gauges and master color grading diamonds were the tools used to apply… Read more »

Among the most pressing challenges to the diamond industry is the need to lift consumer demand. Historically consumer demand has been principally related to marriage. Consequently, diamonds have been marketed as symbols of eternal love and commitment. But millennials commitment to marriage is less than previous generations. They are marrying later, less often and it… Read more »

A number of years ago, the DeBeers Corporation saw its influence over the supply of rough diamonds into the retail pipeline decrease as more players entered the field independent of their marketing network. They correctly saw this as a permanent change and responded by going downstream, opening their own retail outlets and “branding” their finished… Read more »

The English auction house, Christie’s, is celebrating its 250th year in business. As the interesting article in Rapaport’s December issue reports, the auction house was started by a Scot, James Christie, born in Perth, Scotland in 1730. Christie went to London in 1750 and found work with a Covent Garden auctioneer, from whom he learned… Read more »

This post is abstracted from an article in Rapaport Magazine by Shaun Sim about technological advances in the diamond cutting industry. Historically, diamond cutters inspected stones for flaws with nothing more than a 10X loupe and their eyes. In the 1980s, computer applications began to aid them in locating flaws in a rough diamond but… Read more »