Posts By: Al Broberg

For many decades, the DeBeers Corporation funded an ad campaign that was intended to create demand for diamond jewelry, engagement rings in particular, as a symbol of eternal love and beauty. The “Diamonds are Forever” campaign went through many iterations in TV ads and is something baby boomers grew up with. But, times change. DeBeers… Read more »

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust as the good book says.  Or, maybe ashes to carbon, carbon to diamond.  Uncle Lester may have been a drunken lech in real life, but now he may be able to provide beauty and pleasure in the afterlife.  At least according to several companies like LifeGem and Cremation Solutions,… Read more »

To follow up on my March 30th post on D color, Flawless diamonds, the number of these stones sold, most of them at auction, is tiny compared to the volume of diamonds sold worldwide each year or even just at auction. But their impact is huge. The sale of these diamonds makes news in part… Read more »

I did a blog post in January on synthetic diamonds moving into the jewelry pipeline. Both Gems and Gemology (the publication of the Gemological Institute of America) and Rapaport are full of articles lately on synthetic diamonds. It seems that synthetic diamonds are very appealing to Millenials for several seemingly good reasons. “Lab created diamonds… Read more »

It is not uncommon to hear people say that there is no such thing as a perfect diamond. But there is such a thing as a “D” color, Flawless diamond. A “D” color is the highest color grade in the color grading scale of the Gemological Institute of America (GIA), by far the most widely… Read more »

Several months ago, I wrote a blog on the large diamonds being discovered by the Lucara Diamond Corporation at their Karowe mine in Botswana.  It is now being reported by several media outlets that they have discovered the 2nd largest gem quality rough diamond ever found.  Pictured in my facebook post on this, it is 1,111… Read more »

Synthetic diamonds are diamonds grown in a laboratory rather than being found (i.e. mined) in nature.  They are real diamonds.  They have the same chemical composition and crystal lattice structure as those found in nature.  But they are grown in a laboratory using one of two different methods.  The High Pressure High Temperature (HPHT) method… Read more »

The latest issue of Rapaport magazine has an article on diamonds that are known to be 100 carats or more.  Rapaport maintains a Registry which lists the diamonds known to be 100 carats plus, along with other known information such as the mine it came from, the size of the rough it was cut from,… Read more »

I have customers who confuse laboratory certificates with appraisals and that is entirely understandable.  A laboratory report is independent, third party verification that the gemstone in your jewelry (ring, for example) is, in fact, really a (for example) diamond; that it has the measurements and carat weight specified in the report as well as the color, clarity… Read more »

Rapaport is reporting that the Lucara Diamond Corporation has very recently uncovered a number of very large diamonds at their Karowe Mine in Botswana.  The largest is apparently the 336 carat irregularly shaped diamond pictured below.  Also, uncovered over the weekend of August 18th were diamonds weighing 184 carats, 94 carats and 86 carats as… Read more »