This James Allen (merged with bluenile) diamond is not worth buying?

Diamond custom sellers change super fast every single day. The industry updates all the time. For example, bluenile and jamesallen have merged into one company now. No matter how the sellers shift, basic diamond knowledge never change. These rules stay the same forever.

One net friend messaged me online today. He sent me details of a diamond sold on James allen. He asked me to check if this stone worth buying. He also wanted to know whether the diamond quality is good or bad. The full information of this diamond’s GIA certificate is shown in the picture below. I took a close look at its cut proportions and physical measurements first. At first glance, this diamond looks like an ideal one. It gets three excellent cut grades totally. Diamonds with triple excellent cut always own strong fire sparkle. Its color grade is H, clarity grade VS2. Both ranks bring pretty good cost performance for regular buyers.

However, I spotted one bad mark on the flaw diagram of the certificate. The flaw type marked is cavity. This single defect cut down the diamond’s overall score a lot. Many normal inclusions are crystal, feather and needle. They appear much more frequently in loose diamonds. Compare to those common flaws, cavity brings far worse long-term influences to diamond quality. Let me explain its meaning clearly. The word cavity translates to hole mark in Chinese. It forms in two main ways. Sometimes crystals on the diamond surface fall off naturally. Other times, cutters leave angular gaps and pits during later cutting and polishing works.

Diamonds have a natural feature: they attract oil but repel water. As the customer wears the ring longer and longer, more grease stick to the diamond surface. Those cavity holes easily trap dirt and oil inside. People can hardly clean the hidden grime completely. Over time, the trapped dirt will make the diamond fire look much duller to naked eyes.

Besides that, diamonds with cavity inclusions have worse stability than standard flawless stones. Diamond material own high brittleness. They cannot stand hard hits or accidental drops at all. A cavity acts like a primary wound on the gem. Once the diamond receive a strong impact, cracks may spread along the crystal cleavage lines quickly. It might even cause big breaks in serious cases.

So my advice to this net friend is straightforward. If he can find other alternative diamonds, he’d better skip this piece completely. There are tons of high-quality loose diamonds available on James allen, baluenile and whiteflash platforms. He can pick another stone without cavity flaws to avoid all the hidden troubles in daily wearing.