If diamonds are a girl's best friend then why is it that so few of us know anything about her qualities? As girl who rarely ventures beyond costume jewelry from two for one bins at Express and Forever 21, the idea of vetting jewelry, let alone a diamond, makes me nervous. And if the topic sends me into a sweat, can you imagine how it must make a man feel? Heck all of this is scary even before taste enters the picture.
Now many of us have heard of the "Four Cs" Diamond Cut, Color, Clarity & Carat Weight
as factoring into diamond ranking but it still feels like such a mystery when you are on a budget but still crave a quality diamond.
Thus any girl could benefit from learning about the Angara Rating System. This patent pending system really does make judging diamonds not only easier but more intuitive, even for a diamond beginner like yours truly.
They say by themselves, the 4Cs are not a complete buying guide for diamonds. But rather they were created by an industry that didn't have a way of standardizing prices, and needed some level of comparability between stones. Cut, color, clarity and carat, therefore, became the focal parameters that were pulled out of the dozens used to determine a diamond's value. In other words, the diamond industry while trying to make things simpler for consumers actually ended up confusing us even more. Thanks guys!
As a consumer, it is difficult to be able to compare diamonds across so many parameters simultaneously. While the current process makes it difficult, they believe that the objective for consumers is to find the ideal tradeoff between the right quality and the right size.
Enter the Angara Rating!. Their expert gemologists, (working with our gem-novice consumer experts), have developed a proprietary formula that analyzes a variety of different criteria including color, clarity, cut, culet, fluorescence, girdle size, polish and symmetry. All of these factors contribute to the quality of a diamond and should be assessed as a whole. The result is one score, on a scale of 0-100 that determines a diamond's overall quality, much like a Wine Spectator rating, or a Zagat Rating (though those are on 30 points.) Now doesn't that sound a lot easier?
The Angara Rating can serve as a great starting point for your search, since they only choose diamonds that meet our strict requirements. Only diamonds with Angara Ratings of 80 and above are accepted.
So how is the quality of the perfect diamond calculated? The Angara Rating calculator was built through a combination of focus groups and mathematical (regressions/linear equations) analysis. They take into account how the market values different parameters of the diamond (based on extensive industry sales data) including different premiums and discounts people apply to different quality parameters. They conducted extensive focus groups to assess what weights customers give to each parameter.
