What Is a GIA-Certified Diamond?

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name's Rachel and I'm the owner of austinstylewatch.com street fashion site, and I'm also a freelance fashion reporter. Today we're going to talk about what GIA certification means in relation to diamonds; a girls best friend. So, GIA certification is also kind of a girls best friend when it comes to diamonds. It's basically a document telling you exactly what you got, how good it is, how big it is, how clear it is. It's documentation that looks over the diamond and tells you certain standards, and some examples of those are clarity, color, cut, so on and so forth. So, basically the GIA is nice because it's not affiliated with any wholesaler; anybody who sells or mines diamonds. They're their own separate entity. So, you know what you're getting when you get GIA certification when you buy a diamond; isn't some faulty sales mechanism. One of the nice things about the GIA is they have a website where you can print up sample GIA certificates so that you can kind of take a look at if before you go and buy your own diamond, figure out what it means, look at all the different symbols and everything, and understand a little bit better what you're getting into. So, there's a lot of factors on here. I'm only going to address a couple today, and the first one I'm going to talk about is color, and this is the color chart right over here. Diamonds are graded by color in a range from "D to Z" with "D" being perfectly white and "Z" being somewhat yellow. The standard rule is that for things like an engagement ring where it's just a diamond set in it, it should be at least "I" or higher. So, that's your color kind of information. The second thing I'm going to go over is clarity. Clarity is sort of like the color, but what it means is any cloudiness in the diamond, and cloudiness comes from other gems growing inside the diamond so you might have little pieces of other stones, and then it also comes from tiny cracks or "feathers" that happen in the stone that make it just a little bit cloudy and not quite clear. So, you're going to want a low grade on those, not too many inflections in it that are going to cause it to be not so clear. And then size, size is also in here. It's measured by carat. It's the weight of the diamond. It's one fifth of a gram. So, don't just pace any of your judgment on a diamond on any of those one things. A big carat diamond is important, but if it's got tons of little cloudiness clouding the clarity and the diamond is really yellow then it's not such a great deal. So, that's what GIA certification means, and that's how to know what you're getting out of your diamond."