The publication
About
An independent publication about buying diamonds online. It exists because the terms these companies actually commit to are not the ones their marketing describes.
Check live prices — we don't print them here, because they change daily.
Rings
The centre stone is where nearly all the money goes. Compare the same specification at each — shape, carat, colour, clarity, cut grade and grading laboratory held identical, or you are not comparing anything.
Earrings
Sold by total carat weight across the pair, so a 1ct pair is two half-carat stones. Cheap enough to make a sensible first purchase from a retailer you have not used before.
Bracelets
Check the clasp and the safety catch before the stone quality. A tennis bracelet that springs open on the wrist is the most common way people lose one.
Necklaces
The chain matters more than buyers expect. Check the gauge and the clasp — a heavy pendant on a thin chain is a repair waiting to happen.
Links open each retailer's own category page. Rare Carat links are affiliate links and earn us a commission if you buy, at no extra cost to you. The other three are plain links that earn us nothing today; if that changes, this line changes with it. Every relationship is listed on the disclosure page.
Why this exists
Four companies dominate online diamond retail in the United States, and they describe themselves in nearly identical language. Everyone offers free returns. Everyone has a lifetime warranty. Everyone's diamonds are conflict-free.
Underneath that, the terms differ substantially — and the differences are the ones that decide real cases. One retailer's return clock starts at shipment rather than delivery, so transit eats your window. One caps free returns at two a year. One voids the return outright if you resize the ring. Two of the four have the same parent company and neither mentions it.
None of that is hidden. It is published, and almost nobody reads it. So we do, and we write down what it says with the date attached.
What we publish
Policy readings. The return, warranty, resizing and financing terms from each retailer's own pages, in full, dated, with the exclusions that matter pulled out.
Structural explanation. Who owns whom, which of these is a retailer and which is a marketplace, and why that changes where your recourse sits if something goes wrong.
Buyer background. What a clarity grade does and does not tell you, which grading laboratories to trust, what lab-grown costs you on resale. These are stable facts that do not go stale the way a price does.
What we do not publish
We do not print prices. Diamond pricing moves daily and depends on the exact specification, so any figure here would be wrong within weeks — and a stale price reads as a fact. Every page that raises a pricing question tells you how to answer it live instead, and the buttons open the retailers' current listings.
We do not score these companies out of ten. A composite grade implies a weighted measurement behind it; ours would be an opinion wearing a number's clothing.
We have not bought from any of them, and every review says so plainly and lists what that leaves outside our knowledge. That is stated rather than glossed, because a great deal of what gets published in this category implies an ownership experience it never had.
The full reasoning is on the methodology page.
How it is funded
Commission on purchases made through links here, at no cost to you. Every rate is listed on the disclosure page, including one we have not been able to obtain.
What a published policy says is a matter of record. No commercial arrangement changes it, and no retailer has editorial input, advance sight of a page, or the ability to request a change.
Corrections
We have published at least one error and corrected it in the open: we originally wrote that Blue Nile's return window runs from delivery. It runs from shipment. That correction is noted on the returns page rather than quietly patched, and that is how corrections will be handled here.
If something is wrong or out of date, tell us: editor@caratbrands.com.