Everyone wants to purchase a beautiful diamond with a brilliant sparkle that will get wows at cocktail parties. The question is: "How do you empirically measure the beauty of a diamond to ensure the wow effect"?… especially given that most jewelers display diamonds under ideal lighting conditions which make all their diamonds look beautiful. The one that caught your eye in the store may not have the same sparkling beauty in different lighting environments (e.g. - when you bring it home, wear it outside, etc.). This is the dilemma all diamond consumers must face. 

Historically, most jewelers have attempted to help mitigate this problem by providing their customers with the high-level metrics they use themselves to rate diamonds – the 4C's. Unfortunately, not only are the 4C's complex and unintuitive, they also do not always ensure you're purchasing a diamond that will dazzle people with its sparkle. There are many other complex variables (mostly related to cut) that also play a huge role in the beauty of a diamond (table, culet, pavilion angles, etc), which few jewelers share with their customers due to the complex nature of these measurements. The bottom line is that the 4C's are all you need….if the rarity of a stone is your most important criteria. However, rarity does not always correlate with maximum sparkle and beauty (two factors that can vary dramatically among diamonds). So, again, we come back to the customer dilemma of "how do you measure beauty?"

In an effort to help our customers answer this question, David S. Diamonds is now working with a technology company called GemEx, which has created a solution known as the BrillianceScope. This tool measures the Light Performance (the amount and types of light refracted from a diamond), which is the primary driver of the sparkle effect in a diamond. At a minimum, understanding the Light Performance of a diamond provides a complementary set of data that can be used side by side with the standard GIA and AGS reports, as well as the old-fashioned personal visual comparison test. However, many believe it may become the single critical metric, as it essentially takes all the complex variables of a diamond that consumers have traditionally had to manually compute in their heads, and boils them down into a few simple, intuitive outputs which describe the Light Performance and thus beauty of a stone.

Feeling skeptical? We understand you have questions. As a consumer of this technology, we did too before we invested in making it a part of the David S. Diamond buying experience. As a result, before agreeing to utilize their technology, we conducted extensive research on GemEx and their BrillianceScope product. This research included several in-depth discussions with the CEO and founder of GemEx, Randy Wagner, in which we posed to him some of the key questions we thought our customers would have of the BrillianceScope.