Hues & Shades of Green diamonds

Hues & Shades

Shades of Green

There is quite a variation between different shades and hues of green. Although most of the green diamonds we have seen have been intensely coloured, some colours are definitely more attractive than others. There is bound to be an element of personal preference when it comes to choosing your favourite colour of green diamond, but we believe there are some guidelines which will help.

Colour Variations

Because of the rarity of green diamonds, we feel sure we have not yet seen the entire colour range possible, in fact most of the green diamonds we have seen so far fall into one of three groups. The 5 diamonds above were one of the first parcels of green diamonds we saw. From memory, I think we only bought one out of the five available, and there was not a matching pair otherwise we would have bought it.

	Lovat It's often difficult to describe colours, we think this one, selected from the five shown above, has a lovat overtone, perhaps you would describe it differently. All five were bright and attractive. We wish now that we had bought all five of them.
	Peridot This heart shaped green diamond reminds us of peridot, a very bright apple green, with perhaps a hint of neon. It's the only one of its colour we have yet seen. It was brighter and more attractive than our photograph shows it, due to the limits of our photographic skills.
	Emerald Emeralds also vary in colour considerably, but only one of the green diamonds we have seen looked like an emerald. It was an emerald cut about 2.40 carats, and we sold it over ten years ago, and is not the stone shown on the right. Ours had a considerable number of inclusions, which actually made it look even more like an emerald. If you are hoping to find a green diamond with an intense grass green emerald-like colour, you may have to wait a long time! Perhaps we could digress and tell you a brief story. Strangely, and very frustratingly, we owned the green diamond mentioned above for about two years, maybe more. People would come and ask us the price of the "emerald ring". When we showed it to them and proudly announced that actually it was a diamond, instead of the amazed reation we expected to get, many people handed it back to us and said oh no, they wanted an emerald. Even when we explained that green diamond was much rarer than emerald, and much more practical, because its about 100 times more durable, they were not convinced. At the time it seemed incredible to us that people could be so limited and prejudiced in their thinking.
	Chrome Tourmaline We have shown the tourmaline on this page as an example of other green gemstones. The fine emerald-like colour is produced by the presence of chromium, the same element which causes the green colouration in emerald. It is unlikely that green diamonds will have this particularly fine and desirable colour, because the cause of green colouration in diamonds is not caused by chromium.