Lately designers began showing collections of Black Diamond Ring, willing to cross the color line and take a chance on stones that one New York dealer condescendingly described as “faceted lumps of coal.” Consumers responded and black diamond today is a jewelry industry staple.

In India, where nearly all the world’s faceted black diamonds are cut, they are known as “carbons,” a shortening of “carbonado,” a trade term for a specific variety of highly opaque and included industrial stone thought to be the toughest diamond known.

According to gemologist Stephen Hofer, author of the landmark Collecting and Classifying Coloured Diamonds, most black diamonds are in “a transitional carbon state between graphite and pure diamond.

To avoid the appearance problems common with natural-color black diamonds, some designers use easily-cut conventional stones with low color and clarity ratings that have been irradiated to make them look like black onyx: the ideal for black diamond.

Such stones are ultra-rare and have been the object of a secret search among collectors that rivals the more public quest for fugitive colors such as red.

When you couple the stone’s exceptional color with its high polish and uniformly smooth surface, you have “a black diamond as fine as any ever cut. If nothing else, it proves black diamonds can be as awe-inspiringly beautiful as any other diamond.”

The last but not least although larger sizes are more, the price difference is not as much as with colorless diamonds. since most of the cost of a black diamond stems from the labor rather than the value of the material, the difference in cost for melee versus caraters is only double while for whites it is ten times. That makes fine black diamonds in larger sizes an impressive bargain.”