--Colour--

Another one of the 4Cs, Colour...

Colour
For those new to ring shopping, this colour grading does not refer to coloured diamonds like purple, red, blue, yellow that are naturally or synthetically made that way. Those kind of coloured diamonds cost much more than a white diamond.

The colour that this category represents is how 'white' a diamond is. It ranges on a scale from D, being the most white, or absolutely colourless, all the way to Z, a diamond that is extremely yellow. Of course, the whiter a diamond is, the more expensive it'll cost.

The broad range of most commercially sold diamonds will hover around D to J/K/L. They can be generally grouped into:

Colourless: D, E, F
Near Colourless: G, H, I, J

The colourless range will cost a pretty penny and you cannot tell the difference just by casually looking at it. Even the near colourless range are still fairly white and again, unless put beside whiter diamond, you cannot tell what colour grade it is. The ones below J are a different story. The lower the grade, the more significantly yellow it gets and will probably be visible without comparison by the naked eye.

In my opinion, anything above G/H is already really good, and you don't have to get D or E to get an awesome diamond. In general, anything within the near colourless category is buyable.

Keep in mind, even gemologists grade these stones using comparison. They have a set of diamonds from D to Z and they just compare one by one until they find what colour grade it is. In other words, to tell the colour grade of a diamond, you will always need to compare with another colour.