About Diamonds
Candamark mindfully sources diamonds so that you can feel empowered to define and celebrate your own life milestones.
We cut diamonds, not corners.
We believe that beauty is in the smallest, most precise details. Our team of passionate professionals take pride in the process of responsibly mining your diamond, bringing out its brilliance, and ensuring that it’s authentically Canadian.
We know that responsible mining means improving lives, strengthening communities, protecting wildlife, and respecting the environment in which we operate.
By building things the right way from the ground up, we aspire to present a product that our empowered customers can be proud to own for years and decades to come.
The 4C’s
Diamonds are evaluated for carat weight, color grade, clarity grade and cut grade. This ranking standard is known as the 4Cs of Diamond Quality.
Cut
ideal
shallow
deep
A rough diamond can be classified into several main shapes. Stones (octahedron, dodecahedron), cleavage (broken stones), macles and cubes. Each of these main categories has a multitude of sub-categories and variations.
Color
Colorless
D E F
Near Colorless
G H I J
Faint Yellow
K L M
Very Light Yellow
N O P Q R
Light Yellow
S T U V W X Y Z
Generally, the closer a diamond is to being absolutely colourless (white), the more valuable it will be. As the diamonds become more visibly yellow or brown, their value decreases. However, diamonds saturated with colour can be more valuable and are known as “fancies.” Diamonds can be almost any colour of the spectrum, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, pink. Impurities and different degrees of heat in which diamonds are formed cause various colours in diamonds.
Clarity
Flawless,
Internally Flawless
FL, IF
Very Very
Slightly Included
VVS1, VVS2
Very Slightly
Included
VS1, VS2
Slightly
Included
SI1, SI2
Included
I1, I3
Quality is determined by how clean the diamond is inside. Very few diamonds can be described as “flawless”; most have inclusions which may be caused by carbon spots (piques), mineral inclusions (e.g. olivine, garnet, chromite), bubbles or cracks (gletz). The positioning of the inclusions within the diamond influences its value, as some inclusions may be polished out during the manufacturing process. Some diamonds may be so heavily included that it is almost impossible to see into them.
Carat
.5
.75
1
1.5
2
2.5
3
Originally the carat was the weight of a carob seed which ancient lapidaries used to balance their scales, as the seeds in a carob pod are very uniform in weight. This weight was standardized to the metric system as 1 carat = 200 milligrams (one-fifth of a gram). A carat is further divided into points, with 100 points to a carat. In general terms, rough and polished diamonds are weighed to two decimal places.