“CHOCOLATE” DIAMONDS

One in a million…

Diamonds can actually occur in a lot of different colours. Not just white or colourless but also black, brown, yellow, orange, red, pink, violet, blue and green.
While red and blue are probably the most sought after colours for a diamond and also the most valuable, brown and yellow may be more common. It is interesting to notice that the yellow colour in a diamond is due to nitrogen impurities whereas the brown colour may be caused by tremendous combination of pressure and heat causing post-growth plastic deformation.

To a lot of people, brown might be described as a colour per se, however brown is in fact not a spectral colour and therefore not part of our visible spectrum. The colour we call brown is actually a mixture of spectral colour, like red and green, blue and orange or yellow and purple, conferring to the “colour” brown a huge range of possibilities.

In addition to be one of the most common fancy colour for diamond, brown was also the colour of some of the earliest diamonds used, already in second-century roman jewellery. Unfortunately, in modern times, the interest for these types of diamonds was limited to industrial use only, and that until the 1980’s when the production of the Argyle mine started yielding a huge amount of brown diamonds. To make up for the rather low interest in such colours, smart marketing techniques were invented where the gems were accompanied with fancy attractive terms such as “chocolate”, “champagne”, “cognac”, “cinnamon”, “cappuccino”, etc...

One of a sudden, the price and demand for brown diamonds considerably rose.

Between us, wouldn’t you also die to possess a delicious chocolate diamond??? Mmmh yummy........ I know I would!

Mélanie MATTHES
2020-10-04

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