Chipped Diamonds

Despite being incredibly hard, diamonds are brittle, and every so often, a setter (or a jeweller) chips one. Sometimes it’s no problem, like when the stone is only small, and can be replaced with another from the parcel of hundreds of melee. Other times it’s a total headache…

For example, in this instance, we were manufacturing this ring, and the setter chipped a 30pt pear shaped diamond. This unfortunately created a situation whereby, although we had other “pairs of pears”, they didn’t match the the non-chipped diamond.

In another instance, the setter chipped a princess cut diamond. This time it was only a few points, so it was easily replaced. In fact, we usually put an extra stone in for the setter, just in case.

As you may have already guessed, the shapes that are most prone to chipping are ones that have points, like princess cut, marquise, pear and heart, whereas rounds, with no points are very hard to chip. Round melee is however, prone to clumsy setters tredding on them!

If you have a chipped diamond of little to no value, the best thing to do is to donate it to The GAA, who will then use it (hopefully) for research purposes.

This entry was written by Nikhil Jogia and was posted on on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 7:24 pm and is filed under Diamonds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.