What are black diamonds?
16.03.16
Diamonds are found in fantastically vibrant colours, rather than just colourless. These colours include red, violet, pink, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple, champagne, grey, fancy white and even black.
Black diamonds are different from most other diamonds as they are entirely opaque. Still, they are precious stones that are beautiful and valuable.
The demand for black diamonds has gone up substantially in recent years. Indeed, they became an amazingly desired fashion items even though many consumers don't even treat them as diamonds. After all, brilliance is not their strong side.
How diamonds get their black colour? Most coloured diamonds are the result of impurities that occur during their formation process. However, black diamonds are basically white colourless diamonds that have an extremely high amount of inclusions, clusters of graphite inside of them to the point that they simply appear black.
Such diamonds are quite rare. Therefore, most black diamonds on the market are not natural black gemstones but rather treated ones. This is what makes them more affordable than most other coloured diamonds. Low price is achieved by taking cheap white diamonds of an extremely poor quality and turning them black with the help of irradiation or heat treatments.
Image: natural vs. treated diamonds
In a way, a more suitable name for these diamonds is "colourless treated black diamonds" or "black coloured diamonds". Since for the creation of this type of black diamonds "useless" white diamonds are used, these are the cheapest type of black diamonds.
There is another type of black diamonds, which is lab-grown synthetic stones. These are not diamonds in the normal sense of the word, however, some might disagree. While treated diamonds are vastly cheaper than regular diamonds, they are still not cheap. This is why there is a marketplace for lab-grown pink diamonds and blue – which are expensive colours of coloured diamonds.
There are not as many stones of cheaper colours; because such simulants (including black) are like buying zirconia, and are extremely cheap. However, if you are looking for black diamonds, you should know about them and watch out for them too.
