A Guide to E Color Diamonds

If your diamond is “next to perfect” in color, that’s about as good as it gets! An E color diamond is just that – second from the top in the long alphabet of diamond colors. Sitting squarely in the middle of the elite “colorless” range (DEF), this particular color grade is virtually indistinguishable from perfectly colorless. In the real world D, E and F are “icy white”, giving no appearance of yellow.

Diamond color grading at the lab is a practiced skill that takes quite some time to master, even with the best of training. It is necessary to study hundreds of diamonds and compare theme to known master stones in order to develop true expertise. Possibly the biggest challenge for graders is to learn to distinguish the “level of colorlessness” of diamonds in the colorless range. An E color diamond is so close to D (and F for that matter) that without training most people cannot discern the subtle differences.

One of the challenges with color grading of diamonds in general is the influence of the diamond’s cut quality on its face up appearance. An ideal diamond such as an A CUT ABOVE® hearts and arrows, by virtue of its optimal light performance, can appear whiter than its technical grade. A new generation of shoppers is quickly learning that this holds several advantages, even for diamonds already in the colorless range, as ideal cutting optimizes the aspects of fire, brilliance and scintillation. These aspects, deriving from the intrinsic properties of diamond and dependent on the cut craftsmanship of man, combine to transform simple crystallized carbon into something truly extraordinary.

E color diamonds with good clarity and crafted with precision, have beauty at the edge of what is possible in a gem diamond. Colorless ideal diamonds with clarity grades down to Si1 (providing the inclusions are of a type and distribution that do not diminish performance), exhibit fabulous eye appeal and are far less expensive than top gemological clarities.

Another reason some shoppers seek out E colored diamonds is that it they are solidly within the colorless range. Because each color grade actually represents a very narrow range, an F color at the low end could conceivably be graded a G at another time. E color diamonds will likely never fall outside the colorless range when graded by any legitimate lab in any future evaluations. This is the same mindset of many astute shoppers when it comes to insisting on super ideal diamonds. They are crafted to the very bull’s-eye of cut quality and will never fall outside of ideal on any valid cut grade scale, even as new technology makes cut grading more exacting and critical.