The Novara guide · 8 min read
The Novara guide · 8 min
Understand the light.
Four letters decide how a diamond looks, sparkles and costs. Here is everything we check under the loupe — in plain words, with nothing to sell you until the end.
Four letters decide how a diamond looks, sparkles and costs — in plain words.
The first C
Cut, the one that matters most.
Cut is the only C made by people. It decides how much light enters the stone and comes back to your eye — a well-cut diamond looks bigger and brighter than a heavier, poorly cut one.
Cut decides how much light comes back to your eye. We only sell Ideal and Excellent.
Novara only sells ideal & excellent cuts
The second C
Colour, or the lack of it.
Graded from D (icy, completely colourless) down the alphabet as warmth creeps in. Past H, most people start to notice a faint tint — so that’s where we stop.
Graded D (icy) to J (warm). Novara sells D – H.
Novara sells D – H: colourless to near-colourless
The third C
Clarity, seen at 10×.
Tiny natural features — inclusions — are graded under 10× magnification. From VS2 up you will never see them without a loupe, which is why we check every stone before it’s listed.
Eye-clean from VS2 up — we check every stone under the loupe.
Eye-clean from VS2 up
The fourth C
Carat, is weight, not size.
One carat is 0.2 grams. Two stones of the same weight can look very different depending on cut and shape — ovals and pears face up larger than rounds of the same carat. Shown here at true scale.
One carat is 0.2 g. Ovals and pears face up larger than rounds.
Lab-grown vs mined
