Index
Guides
The background you need before comparing retailers: what the grades mean, what a carat costs, and where lab-grown makes sense.
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 others are plain links that earn us nothing today. If that changes, this line changes with it. Every relationship is listed on the disclosure page.
- The 4Cs, without the sales pitch — Four grades decide what a diamond costs. Only one of them decides what it looks like. Retailers rarely put it that way,...
- Which grading reports to trust — A grading report is only worth the reputation of the laboratory that issued it. Two labs dominate online retail, they...
- Lab-grown vs natural: the honest trade-off — They are the same material, graded on the same scales, and one of them has lost most of its value over five years. That...
- Finding a ring size without asking — Four methods, ranked by how often they actually work, plus the one thing that matters more than getting it right: what...
- How much to spend — The three-months-salary rule was written by an advertising agency in the 1930s. Here is a way to set a number that is...
- What a 1 carat diamond costs — Two one-carat diamonds can differ in price by a factor of five. Nothing about that is a scam — it is what the other...
- What a 2 carat diamond costs — Doubling the carat weight does not double the price — it multiplies it by considerably more. That is the single thing to...
- What a lab-grown diamond costs — Lab-grown prices have fallen faster than almost any consumer product in recent memory, and the direction has not...
- Selling a diamond: what you will actually be offered — The first thing to know is the hardest: a diamond resells for a fraction of what it cost. That is not because you were...
- Carat weight against actual size — Carat is a weight, not a size. Doubling the weight adds only about a quarter to the width — which is why a two-carat...
- What a 3 carat diamond costs — Three carats is the most-searched price in the diamond market — more than one or two — and it is the size where the gap...
- What a 5 carat diamond costs — At five carats you leave the ordinary market. Supply thins, price per carat climbs steeply, individual stones stop being...
- How much is a diamond? — There is no answer to this question, and every site that gives you one is guessing. What there is instead is a short...
Prices
What sets the number, weight by weight. None of these pages prints a price — they explain how the pricing works and how to get today's figure in five minutes.
- How much is a diamond — the six factors, in order of impact
- Carat size chart — weight against millimetres
- 1 carat · 2 carats · 3 carats · 5 carats · lab-grown
Still to write
In build order: how to read a grading report line by line · diamond shapes and what each one hides · what an appraisal is for and who should write one.