When it comes to grading diamonds, we go by the 4 C’s we discussed in our education section. A diamond can have perfect color but not clarity. It can have perfect clarity but a weird cut. In fact, some diamonds have had millions shaved off their value due to bad craftsmanship alone. But what if a diamond was perfect in every regard?
The Perfect Diamond
There are a few problems with the idea of a perfect diamond. While most of a diamond’s perfections are easily measurable, size is not. Depending on what you’re using the diamond for, you’d want a different size, so we’ll remove that factor from the equation.
Disregarding size, we have actually had a ‘perfect’ diamond. In 2013, a 102 carat pear-shaped diamond was sold in Geneva, Switzerland at a high class auction. After fetching a price of nearly $27 million, the owner left happy. To this day that diamond is still considered the most perfect diamond ever to be created, having gotten maximum scores in every category.
What are the odds?
To give an idea of how rare that feat was, it’s estimated that 147 million carats of rough diamonds are produced/mined each year. That means that tens, maybe hundreds, of billions of carats in diamonds have been pulled out of the earth. So far, 102 carats of those have been labeled as absolutely perfect. So the chances of finding a perfect diamond are slim to say the least.
Since the diamond is flawless, light passes through it seamlessly, which causes it to show “whiter” in photographs. Here is a photo shoot that Sotheby’s did with the diamond.
Yes, that’s a real diamond and yes, Photoshop was also used in these pictures. Finding a photo of it that wasn’t shopped is actually fairly difficult because they were extremely careful regarding photographing it.