JCK-Jewelers Circular Keystone – De Beers approves Snap Lake financing

JCK-Jewelers Circular Keystone – De Beers approves Snap Lake financing

Interesting developments definitely happening in the diamond industry in the next few years. Soon there will be a major player in Canada, and this is no small matter. This will not affect buyers looking for a diamond engagement ring today, but it is something for people in the trade to track over the next decade.

AGS is Changing the Market

AGS is soon changing the entire landscape for the diamond market, from cutters of the rough all the way up to the final consumer that wears the finished diamond on her hand. This is going to be announced to the public in August I think, but we are hearing about it already in the trade.

The change has to do with the way they are going to grade the cut of a diamond. Actually, what makes it such a big change, is that they are not going to grade the cut now. Rather, they are going to measure the performance of the diamond in the way it returns light to the viewer. This means they are going to evaluate ACTUAL brilliance of the diamond, instead of trying to PREDICT brilliance based on so-called ideal parameters for the stone’s measurements and proportions. This is truly revolutionary, and only possible with the advent of modern computer-driven laser measurement and modeling techniques developed and refined in recent years.

More about this later, but this is bigtime stuff. And it’s exciting.

It will change the way people educate themselves, because you won’t have to worry about crown angles and depth percentages anymore. If it has a high performance rating, who cares what the proportions are? Those measurements are only important now becuase they allow you to GUESS a diamond’s beauty in the absence of true measurement of the the beauty. Now those details will become less important, and we will start to compare based on simple meausurements of brilliance.

Cool! But it will change the way diamonds are cut, bought, and sold. More later….

GIA Research on Diamond Cut

Great article on diamond cut, if you are into all the scientific approach. The big surprises are the so-called ideal cut proportions that have been hyped so much, don’t always outperform all other proportions for light return.

GIA: GIA Research: Article Detail:

“August 30, 2002–The GIA Diamond Proportion Module: Illustrating How Changes in Individual Proportions Affect the Appearance of a Round Brilliant Cut Diamond
Barak Green, T. Scott Hemphill, Mary Johnson, and James Shigley”

De Beers rough diamond sales rose 3% in 2004

“De Beers rough diamond sales rose 3% in 2004
South Africa’s De Beers said that diamond sales during 2004 were boosted by Asian demand and a weakening dollar, sending net profits soaring by 25% to $498 million, Agence France Presse reports.”

Nice to know they are doing well. Now if only the jewelers could find a way to increase their profits. Of course, I am not talking about the mall stores, they have a huge markup in most cases. But the stores I like to find are the ones that give low prices but don’t give in the pressures to cut services or the time they spend with customers. They aren’t many left, but I am hunting them down. It’s a challenge, but I like a good challenge once in a while.

Husband/wife store owners killed in robbery

This is one reason why jewelry stores are difficult and costly to operate. I had a 30-06 rifle pointed at my face by a 17-year-old suicidal pregnant girl when I was managing a store in Austin. Needless to say, the owners finally listened to my advice to spend the money to get a security system and keep a guard on duty. Diamonds are very attractive to the criminal mind. And insurance on diamonds is much harder to obtain and a lot more expensive than it is for most other retail merchandise.

JCK-Jewelers Circular Keystone – Husband and wife store owners killed in robbery: “Husband and wife store owners killed in robbery

Anthony DeMarco, JCK Senior Editor
JCK-Jewelers Circular Keystone — 2/3/2005 1:56:00 PM

An armed robbery of a Fairfield, Conn., jewelry store on Wednesday ended with the shooting deaths of the couple who owned the store. “