April Birthstone Diamond: History, Craft & Color
Diamond holds April on the modern American list, on the traditional list before it, on the British list of 1937, and on the Ayurvedic list. The Tibetan list is the only one that disagrees.
George Frederick Kunz, the scholar the 1912 American birthstone list rested on, argued in print that diamond did not belong in a month list at all.
Diamond spent most of its history as a minor ornamental stone, valued for being unbreakable rather than beautiful, until cutters in Bruges learned to work it to pattern in the 1470s.
Diamond tops the hardness scale and still chips, because it has perfect cleavage in four directions. Hardness resists scratching. It does nothing about a knock.
Every famous diamond found before the Brazilian discoveries came out of India, and most of them passed through one market town.
The April birthstone diamond turns up in quantity in every era Filigree carries, and no other birthstone does that. Its story is a cutting story. For most of recorded history the stone was prized for being hard rather than for being bright, and it sat below ruby, sapphire, and emerald in the market. Then cutters in Bruges worked out how to open it up, and everything a modern buyer looks at follows from that.
Behind all of it stands one place. Four mine complexes in southern India, a market town with its own currency and credit system, and the court treasuries that absorbed what came out.
- What Is the Birthstone for April?
- What Does the April Birthstone Symbolize?
- How Did Golconda and the Mughal Courts Shape the Diamond?
- Why Did Diamond Take So Long to Become the Leading Gem?
- What Diamond Cuts Belong to Each Era?
- How Did Diamond Jewelry Change Across the Eras?
- What Are the 4Cs of a Diamond?
- How Has Diamond Cutting Evolved?
- What Are Fancy Colored Diamonds?
What Is the Birthstone for April?
Diamond is the April birthstone on the modern American list, on the traditional list that came before it, and on the British list of 1937. The Ayurvedic list agrees. One list disagrees, and it is the Tibetan one.
Ask about April birthstones in the plural and the answer depends on which list you mean. American jewelers met in Kansas City in August 1912 and set the first standard list. Some months changed that year. March dropped bloodstone for aquamarine, and August moved peridot ahead of sardonyx. April did not move. The British list of 1937 kept diamond and added rock crystal as an alternate, which is the only Western hedge on the month. The mystical or Tibetan list, which reached the West in the 1980s, gives April to opal instead.
Before 1912 the practice was older and much looser. Lists circulated in Europe from the eighteenth century, tied to the twelve stones of the breastplate in Exodus and to the zodiac, and no two of them agreed. What the Kansas City meeting did was pick one and print it. That is why the modern list looks settled and the older ones do not.
The committee needed twelve stones a jeweler could keep in stock. That ruled out anything too rare or too soft, and it is why several months carry a stone chosen for supply rather than for custom. Diamond cleared all three tests. It looked the part. It survived daily wear. And there was finally enough of it to sell. It cleared the supply test only because South Africa had just made that possible.
The Cape changed the arithmetic in about thirty years. A farmer's child near Hopetown picked up a bright pebble in 1867. The four great Kimberley pipes opened in 1870 and 1871, one after another. By the end of the century South Africa was supplying roughly nine tenths of the world's diamonds. Cape stones ran larger on average than Indian ones, though most carried a yellowish tinge, and Indian material kept its premium for fire.
There is a complication worth knowing, and it comes from the man whose work the list rested on. George Frederick Kunz was Tiffany's gem expert and the scholar behind the American birthstone system. In his own 1913 book he argued that diamond did not belong in a month list at all. It does not appear to have been known to the ancients as a natal stone, he wrote, and it is given in no birthstone list before the nineteenth century. His suggestion was that diamond worked better as a border around the stone of the month than as the stone itself. He put it in the same class as gold and platinum: something everyone wears, and therefore nobody's in particular. His own traditional list hedges further still and gives April to diamond and sapphire jointly.
None of that unseats diamond. It does show that the assignment is a modern trade decision rather than an ancient inheritance, which is true of most of the calendar. Compare May, where emerald had held the month in Europe for as long as stones had been given to months and no decision was needed. Diamond's claim on April is younger and rests on different ground. Not custom, but the plain fact that by 1912 a jeweler could put a diamond in a case and count on another one arriving.
The stone itself is simple to describe and strange to think about. Diamond is pure carbon, the only gem made of a single element. It is the same material as graphite and charcoal, arranged differently. Newton suspected as much in 1675. Smithson Tennant proved it in 1797 by burning a diamond and weighing the carbon dioxide that came off, which matched what an equal weight of plain carbon gives. Humphry Davy confirmed it in 1816 by showing that no water came off in the process, which ruled out the last competing theory.
April also carries two anniversaries. Diamond marks the 60th and the 75th, and the 60th is where the word attached itself to a jubilee. The birthstone jewelry guide lays out the full calendar, and the diamond jewelry pieces are where April sits in the inventory: Georgian rose cuts through stones finished this year.
What Does the April Birthstone Symbolize?
Innocence. Every older virtue attached to diamond runs back to the same two physical facts. It is the hardest thing there is, and it is clear.
Kunz set out the April package in 1913. It runs to the guardian angel Ashmodei, the sign Taurus, the flower daisy, and a verse warning that a woman born in April should wear diamonds or bitter tears will follow. The verse is Victorian doggerel and he knew it. The better passage is his seasonal essay, where diamond is the gem of light. Its color is the color of ice, he wrote, and like light broken into a spectrum it gives every known color, and combining those colors gives white back again.
He made the case for rarity in a way that lands. Gold cannot be worked at a profit much below one part in 250,000. Diamond can be worked at one part in ten million.
The talismanic claims all sit downstream of hardness and clarity. Older accounts give diamond victory in battle, fortitude, and courage, and describe it driving off night spectres when set in gold and worn on the left arm. A Talmudic tradition has the high priest's diamond dimming or brightening to show guilt or innocence. Hindu practice sorted diamonds into four classes by color and gave each class its own virtue. The most useful of these beliefs to a modern reader is the one holding that a diamond's power was lost if the stone was bought rather than given. It is a very old argument for jewelry as a gift.
One dissent survives, and it is a good one. Girolamo Cardano, writing in the sixteenth century, thought a stone that made its wearer fearless was a poor gift. Fear is what keeps people out of trouble. He compared the effect to sunlight falling on a plant already in full sun.
Taken plainly, the April sentiment is not luck and not protection. It is clarity standing in for character. That is why the stone ended up in every form the trade makes, from a single stud to a diamond necklace of seventy matched stones.
How Did Golconda and the Mughal Courts Shape the Diamond?
Every great historic diamond found before the Brazilian discoveries of the 1720s came out of India. Most of them passed through one market town. Golconda was that town, and what it moved supplied the Mughal treasuries.
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier made six voyages east between 1631 and 1668 and went to the mines himself. His account, published in 1676, is the closest thing we have to a survey of that trade written from inside it.
He describes four sources. Rammalakota sat in the kingdom of Bijapur, five days from Golconda, where diamonds ran in veins through a conglomerate of earth and stone. Workers cut them out with short iron crowbars, which split a good many along their cleavage planes. The stones that survived were the cleanest and whitest of any Indian mine, and cutters worked on site. Kollur lay seven days east on the Kistna river and was the largest operation of its kind in the seventeenth-century world. Up to sixty thousand men, women, and children dug pits two feet deep across a sandy plain and washed the earth in basins. Kollur gave up the Great Mogul, and its stones often picked up color from the soil around them. Soumelpour in Bengal was worked by washing the Koel river in January and February, once the monsoon had gone down. It produced sharp natural octahedra that needed no cutting at all. Borneo Tavernier knew only by report, where the Queen restricted export and stones changed hands quietly at Batavia.
Golconda itself was the market. Everything came there, and everything cost about a fifth more there than at the pit. The king took a royalty of two percent on every purchase, collected by the governor's agents, and concealment meant confiscation.
The mechanics are the part worth slowing down for. Buyers and sellers set prices by touch, one hand under a cloth or a waistband, the buyer grasping particular fingers to name a figure. Nothing was said aloud, and nobody standing nearby could follow it. Tavernier also found that some of the sharpest merchants at the mines were children between ten and sixteen. Families sent them there to learn, and by their mid-teens they were trading on their own account. Money moved through shroffs, the money-changers. They sealed bags of coin with their own mark to guarantee the count, and issued bills of exchange that a correspondent honored at the far end. A merchant crossing dangerous country carried paper instead of gold. The system worked the way a wire transfer works.
Above the merchants sat the court. Indian sovereigns claimed every stone over thirty mangelis, roughly thirty-seven carats, and that claim is why Rome never saw an Indian diamond much larger than a hazelnut kernel. In November 1665 Aurangzeb had his jewels brought out for Tavernier to examine. Among them was the Great Mogul at 319 and a half ratis, cut as a high rose by a Venetian named Hortensio Borgio. Borgio lost more than half the rough weight doing it, and Aurangzeb fined him ten thousand rupees for the waste. Twenty-three years earlier Tavernier had seen the Great Table at Golconda, the largest stone in merchant hands he ever handled in India.
Those stones did not stay put. In 1739 Nadir Shah sacked Delhi and carried the Mughal treasury back to Persia. By one well-known account the Koh-i-Noor got its name on that campaign. Nadir Shah opened a turban traded with the defeated emperor and called what fell out a mountain of light. One military season redrew the map of famous diamonds. Tavernier's own violet-blue stone went to Louis XIV and is the ancestor of the Hope. Today the Regent sits at the Louvre, the Hope at the Smithsonian, the Orlov in the Kremlin Armory, and the Darya-ye Noor in Tehran. Every one of them is a Golconda stone.
What survives of that world in an estate case is indirect but real. Art Deco was the last era to use Golconda-era Indian rough in quantity. That is part of why an old mine cut from the 1920s can look unlike a stone cut fifty years later. The material was different, not only the fashion.
Why Did Diamond Take So Long to Become the Leading Gem?
Because nobody could open it up. Diamond spent most of its history as a minor ornamental stone, admired for being unbreakable rather than for being beautiful, and colored stones outranked it for centuries.
Ruby led the European market from about 1500 to 1800. Balas ruby, sapphire, and emerald each took the lead at other points. Michael Psellus, writing in eleventh-century Constantinople, has almost nothing to say about diamond except that it is hard and difficult to pierce. That is the whole entry.
Its chief aristocratic use through the Middle Ages was writing on glass. Francis I is said to have scratched a verse into a window at Chambord with the point of one. Elizabeth I and Walter Raleigh are described trading lines on a windowpane the same way. A stone whose best trick is engraving is a tool, not a jewel.
What changed was the wheel. A corporate body of gem polishers and cutters formed in Paris in 1290. Diamond polishers are on record in Nuremberg by 1373. Bruges had a Corporation of Diamond Workers by 1465, which means cutting of some kind was already going on there. Then in 1475 Louis de Berquem cut three stones to pattern for Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, and was paid three thousand ducats for the work. One of the three went to Pope Sixtus IV. Another was set in a clasped-hands ring and sent to Louis XI. Three separate nineteenth-century historians of the trade, working from different documents, agree on that hinge.
Before Berquem, a cutter polished the faces a crystal already had. After him, a cutter decided what shape the stone would be. That is the whole difference, and it is why diamond's rise starts in the 1470s rather than in antiquity. Nothing about the stone changed. The history of diamond cutting is a history of tools.
What Diamond Cuts Belong to Each Era?
Every antique diamond cut solved a problem. The shape of the stone tells you which problem the cutter faced, and roughly when he faced it.
The line runs point, table, lasque, rose, brilliant, old mine, old European, transitional, modern round brilliant. Each form kept the one before it in circulation rather than wiping it out, which is why an estate case holds several at once.
The point is a polished octahedron, a four-sided pyramid above and below, and it was standard through the sixteenth century. The table grinds the top point flat into a square plane with a smaller one beneath, which doubled what a stone could return. The lasque is a flat shallow slab, a table top with sloping sides and nothing under the girdle, cut to cover a surface rather than to catch light.
The rose cut arrives around 1520 and is the first form a modern eye recognizes as jewelry. Flat on the bottom, domed on top, covered in triangular facets in two rows. It gives a soft directional glow rather than fire, which is what a candle-lit room wanted. The Dutch rose carries twenty-four facets, and the smallest roses ran well over a thousand to the carat. Flat twinned crystals, which cannot be cleaved cleanly, went to the rose cutters as a matter of course.
The brilliant was worked out by Vincenzio Peruzzi in Venice in the late seventeenth century. Two cones joined at the girdle, the top truncated into a table, thirty-two facets above and twenty-four below. Everything after it refines the same idea.
The old mine cut is that early brilliant in practice. High crown, small table, large open culet, and a cushion outline that follows the shape of the rough instead of fighting it. Under one lamp it breaks light into a few broad flashes rather than a fine spray. The old European cut diamond rounds that outline out through the late nineteenth century and into the 1920s, keeping the high crown and the visible culet. Look down through the table of one and you see a small circle at the bottom where a modern stone comes to a point. The transitional cut sits between old European and modern, and it is a moment rather than a standard, which is why two transitional stones can look quite unlike each other. Filigree's antique cut diamonds run across that whole span, and the old mine cut piece takes that further.
The modern round brilliant has fifty-seven or fifty-eight facets and, since Marcel Tolkowsky's 1919 analysis, proportions worked out on paper before the stone is touched. A well-proportioned brilliant beats every earlier form for fire. Those proportions had been described before Tolkowsky put numbers to them. The table is ground from five ninths of the upper half and the culet from one ninth of the lower. The crown takes a third of the total depth and the pavilion two thirds. The Koh-i-Noor, recut in London in 1852, fails that test, and the gem literature of the period says so in one word. Too thin.
Three trades stand behind all of it. Cleaving splits a stone along an octahedral plane with a single struck blow, and a mistake there cannot be undone. Bruting rubs two diamonds together under pressure to rough out a shape. Grinding and polishing happen at once on a wheel charged with diamond powder, because nothing softer will cut diamond. And the wheel has to run with the grain. Hardness varies by face and by direction on a single crystal, and grinding across the grain is close to impossible. That one physical fact shaped every cut on this list.
How Did Diamond Jewelry Change Across the Eras?
Diamond appears in quantity in every era Filigree carries, and no other birthstone does. Each era gave it a different job.
Georgian (1714 to 1837). Rose and old mine cuts, set in silver on the front with gold behind for strength. The gold never showed. Stones sat in closed-back collets, each in its own metal cup, often over foil to push color and light back up through the crystal. That was built for candlelight. Rivieres ran a graduated line of collets around the throat, and girandole earrings hung three drops from a single top stone. Paste was cut and set with the same care as diamond and was not a cheat, only a different material.
Victorian (1837 to 1901). The era that changed the market more than any other. Diamond began the period scarce and Indian or Brazilian in origin, and ended it abundant and South African. Cape stones ran larger but most carried a yellowish tinge, which pushed design toward settings that could carry a warmer stone. Indian material kept its premium for fire. The Koh-i-Noor was recut for Queen Victoria in 1852, from 186 carats down to 106 and a bit. Flat South African twins, called macles, were sent to the rose cutters as standard practice, so rose cuts stayed in production long after the brilliant took the high end. Victorian jewelry is where diamond stops being rare and starts being ordinary.
Edwardian (1901 to 1915). Everything white: platinum, diamond, pearl, and openwork fine enough to pass for lace. Platinum could be drawn thin enough to disappear, which let a setter hold a stone with almost no visible metal. Milgrain put a row of tiny beads along every edge. Knife-edge settings tapered the metal to nothing from the front. Pave laid small stones so close together that the surface came out continuous. Amsterdam was at its peak while this was being made: about seventy establishments, seven thousand grinding wheels, more than twelve thousand people. Stone selection mattered more here than anywhere else, because one yellowish Cape stone in a white composition shows. Edwardian work is diamond used as light rather than as a centerpiece.
Art Deco (1920 to 1935). Diamond turns structural. Baguettes run in channels and railroads to draw a line. Calibre-cut stones are ground individually to fill one specific slot. Single-cut and rose melee cover platinum fields to make a luminous ground for onyx and colored stone. The center stone stops being the point. This was also the last era to use Golconda-era Indian rough in quantity. The handover from old European to round brilliant happens mid-era too, so two Deco pieces five years apart can hold noticeably different stones. Filigree's diamond bracelets include Deco links that mix old European, step, emerald, trilliant and shield cuts in one piece, which is a fair summary of Art Deco practice.
Retro (1935 to 1950). The War Production Board restricted platinum for military use in 1942, and gold took over. Big warm-toned stones suited gold better than diamond did, so diamond dropped to accent duty behind aquamarine, citrine, and amethyst. Small diamonds went into flush settings, sunk level with the surrounding metal, and into red-white-blue patriotic brooches alongside ruby and sapphire. Retro design is the one era where diamond is clearly the supporting player.
Mid-Century (1950 to 1970). Diamond as punctuation in textured gold. Jean Schlumberger scattered small brilliants across enamel and hammered gold as light in a field of color. Van Cleef and Arpels built ballerina clips where the dancer's skirt is calibre-cut ruby or sapphire and the diamonds do the bodice and the tiara. Carat weight was not the display. Contrast was. Mid-century design treats a diamond as a compositional tool.
For dating an estate piece, the metalwork tells you more than the stone. A closed-back foiled collet is Georgian. Milgrain and knife-edge in platinum are Edwardian. A calibre-cut channel is high Deco. Gold with a small flush-set diamond and a large colored stone is Retro. The cuts narrow it further, and the two together will usually put a piece inside a decade.
What Are the 4Cs of a Diamond?
Cut, color, clarity, and carat weight. Cut is the one that decides whether the other three show.
Cut is the only one anybody controls. It covers proportion, symmetry, and polish, and it governs how the stone handles light. A high color and clarity grade in a badly proportioned stone leaks light out the bottom and looks dull. A modest stone cut well does not. Color on the standard scale runs D through Z, from colorless to a faint yellow or brown, in steps small enough that adjacent grades are hard to separate face-up. Clarity runs from flawless down through the slightly included and included grades, all judged at ten power, which means most inclusions in the middle grades are invisible without a loupe. Carat weight is mass, a fifth of a gram, not size. Two stones of the same weight can face up quite differently depending on how the weight is distributed.
That framework is modern and worth knowing well. The diamond engagement rings are where the grades stop being abstract.
The older vocabulary is the part most buyers never meet, and it turns up constantly on estate paperwork. The trade graded by water before it graded by letter. First water meant perfectly transparent, colorless, and faultless. Second water meant slight color or a small fault. Third water meant an obvious one. Blue-white described the top of the colorless range, a stone with a faint steel-blue cast, and it was scarcer from South Africa than from India or Brazil.
The fault words are still in use at the bench. A feather is an internal cleavage crack. Clouds are grey, brown, or white patches. Sand is a scatter of seed-like specks, called dust when it is very fine. Ash and straw spots describe what they sound like. Icy flakes are damage from overheating a stone during grinding, which is a cutting fault rather than a natural one. Read an appraisal from 1930 and you will find these words rather than grades. They describe the same features the modern report describes, in the language of people who were looking at the stones by daylight and by eye.
How Has Diamond Cutting Evolved?
The Indian cutter and the Amsterdam cutter worked toward different ends. Understanding the distance between them is understanding how diamond became a gem of light rather than a gem of hardness.
Tavernier found multitudes of cutters at the Golconda mines in the 1660s, each working at a steel wheel about the size of a dinner plate. Their rule was direct. If the rough was clear, they polished the natural crystal faces and stopped. If it had flaws or colored specks, they covered it in facets to disguise them. A buyer who knew this could read the result at a glance. Any Indian diamond that had been faceted was a stone with something to hide. Behind that practice sat a conviction the sources repeat across two centuries. Indian cutters prized the Naife, the naturally finished crystal, above any worked stone. A stone perfected by nature, the saying ran, was superior to one polished by human art.
European practice inverted that priority. The point was not how much of the crystal survived. The point was what the finished stone could do with light. When the craft settled in Amsterdam by the seventeenth century, that inversion became industrial. Streeter, writing in 1877, reported that out of twenty-eight thousand Jewish inhabitants of Amsterdam, ten thousand were connected to the diamond business. By 1904, when Bauer surveyed the trade, the city held roughly seventy establishments, seven thousand grinding machines, and more than twelve thousand workers. Cleavers, bruters, and polishers trained as separate trades and were paid as separate trades.
Streeter recorded what the work looked like at the bench. Polishers held the diamond against a wheel spinning at roughly two thousand revolutions a minute, wearing thick leather gloves, brushing the facets with a camel-hair brush, and touching the stone with the tongue to keep the surface damp. The thumb pressure required was fine enough that polishers' thumbs sometimes became visibly enlarged over a career. The whole operation ran on diamond's own dust. Nothing softer would cut diamond, so the wheel was charged with diamond powder, and the refuse from every stone fed the next.
Paris, once the center, emptied out. The city had seventy-five cutters in full work in the seventeenth century. By 1775, seven masters remained, scarcely able to earn a living. Cardinal Mazarin had ordered twelve of the thickest French crown diamonds recut. By 1774, only one of the twelve survived in the inventory. The skill had moved to where the labor and the philosophy were, and Amsterdam held both. The history of diamond cutting traces that line further, and Filigree's antique cut diamonds hold both the Indian approach and the Amsterdam approach in the same inventory.
What Are Fancy Colored Diamonds?
The April birthstone is colorless by convention. In practice, colored diamonds exist in almost every hue, most of them rarer than the colorless stones the market defaults to, and the finest of them worth more than the most perfect white stone of the same size.
The causes are specific. Nitrogen in the crystal lattice gives yellow, by far the most common tint. Boron gives blue. Natural radiation over geological time gives green. Distortion of the lattice itself, with no foreign element involved, gives pink and red. That last distinction is the reason pink and red diamonds have no impurity to point at and no laboratory shortcut to reproduce.
Bauer set out the numbers in 1904. About one quarter of diamonds are perfectly colorless. Another quarter carry a faint tinge. The rest are colored to some degree. By frequency, yellow leads by a wide margin, in every shade from citron to honey. Then green, brown, grey, and black. Red is rare. Blue is rarest. Fine color reverses the usual order of value entirely. A saturated natural blue, pink, or green outranks the most perfect colorless stone on the market. The Pink Star, a 59.60-carat fancy vivid pink, sold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2017 for $71.2 million, the auction record for any gemstone.
Three colored diamonds have been famous long enough to anchor the category. The Hope, 45.52 carats, is a Type IIb blue, colored by boron and almost free of nitrogen. It arrived in Europe as a 112-carat rough that Tavernier sold to Louis XIV, was stolen from the French crown in 1792, and resurfaced in London decades later. Streeter personally examined it in the 1870s and theorized it had been cleaved from the original French Blue. In 2005, Smithsonian researchers confirmed the main claim through computer modeling while ruling out one of his secondary theories. The Dresden Green, 40 carats, has sat in the Green Vaults since 1743, the oldest documented fancy green of that size. And the Tiffany Yellow, 128.54 carats, came out of the Cape mines in 1878 and remains one of the largest fancy yellow brilliants in existence.
An Arab writer named Ben Mansur ranked diamond colors centuries before the modern grading system existed. White came first, then a variety he called Pharaonic, then olive, red, green, blue, and fire-colored last. The historical record of color treatment is just as old. Emperor Rudolf II was said to have a preparation distilled from antimony that cleared flaws and discoloration under heat, and the process died with him because he told nobody. Parisian dealers washed yellowish stones in dilute potassium permanganate, whose violet cancels yellow for as long as the coating lasts. And one brownish diamond belonging to a Parisian jeweler named Halphen turned rose-red when heated and held the color for about ten days in the dark before reverting. That was a real optical effect, not a trick, and nobody at the time could explain it.
The modern rule is full disclosure. Treatments that change color permanently exist, and any of them must appear on the grading report. The diamond jewelry collection runs across the color range, and the distinction between a stone graded on the D-to-Z colorless scale and one graded as a fancy sits in whether the color is faint enough to be a defect or strong enough to be the point.
Three collections worth a look
Diamond Jewelry
Necklaces, bracelets, earrings and rings across Georgian rose cuts, Edwardian platinum, Art Deco geometry and By Filigree work.
Browse Diamonds →Diamond Engagement Rings
Where the four Cs stop being abstract. Old mine, old European, transitional and modern brilliant centers in every era of mount.
Browse Engagement Rings →Antique Cut Diamonds
Rose, old mine, old European and transitional stones cut by hand and by eye, for anybody who already owns a modern brilliant.
Browse Antique Cuts →One wheel and four mines
Diamond is the only gem made of a single element, and the only birthstone that shows up in serious numbers in every era of jewelry Filigree carries. Both of those facts are about the material. The rest of the story is about people working out what to do with it.
That working-out has a date. Before the 1470s, a diamond was a hard curiosity good for writing on glass. After, it was something a cutter could design. Everything a modern buyer weighs, the four Cs, the antique cuts, the round brilliant itself, sits downstream of one wheel in Bruges and four mine complexes in southern India. The diamond jewelry pieces are where that sequence is visible in one place.
The Diamond Collection
Georgian rose cuts through Edwardian platinum, Art Deco links and modern brilliants, in rings, pendants, earrings and bracelets.
Tuesday–Friday 11AM–6PM · Saturday 11AM–5PM
April Birthstone Diamond
Is there another April birthstone besides diamond?
On the major Western lists, no. Diamond holds April on the modern American list of 1912 and on the traditional list before it. The British list of 1937 carries rock crystal as an alternate, and the mystical or Tibetan list, which reached the West in the 1980s, gives April to opal instead.
Can a diamond chip or break?
Yes. Diamond has perfect cleavage in four directions, so a hard knock on the girdle or on the corner of a step cut can take a piece off. Hardness resists scratching and does nothing about impact. A bezel or a half bezel covers the edge where that damage lands.
What is the difference between an old mine cut and a modern round brilliant?
An old mine cut has a high crown, a small table, a large open culet, and a cushion outline, and it was cut by hand and by eye for candlelight. A modern round brilliant has fifty-seven or fifty-eight facets in proportions calculated on paper. The old cut gives a few broad flashes. The modern one gives a finer spray.
What anniversary is diamond?
Diamond marks the 60th and the 75th wedding anniversaries on the standard modern list. The 60th is the reason a sixtieth of anything is called a diamond jubilee. Yellow diamond is sometimes given for the 60th specifically, with colorless diamond kept for the 75th.
Why is diamond the hardest gemstone but not the toughest?
Hardness measures resistance to scratching, and diamond leads that scale by a wide margin. Toughness measures resistance to chipping and fracture, and diamond has perfect cleavage in four directions, which gives a blow somewhere to travel. The hardest material available is still a brittle one.
