Diamond Ring Designs

Diamond Ring Designs

Diamonds are everyone’s best friend- How to maximize your options with top quality design

Ironically despite the well-known saying, a lot of people have no idea what their options are with diamonds. Beautiful stones can sit on pretty uninspired rings without a lot of effort going into actual design. More time and effort may be spent on an engraving on the ring, than putting the diamonds in their best settings.

Design issues

Diamond designs are a true art form, and the horror of diamond aficionados regarding banal designs is fully justified. If you have good uncut stones or larger old stones, it’s a terrible mistake to “quarry” them without some idea of the design you want. A square cut may be convenient, but not optimum. Diamonds are more designer friendly than most people realize.

Natural shapes vary considerably, and the expert designers know how to use every millimeter without wastage. Some of the modern Chinese and Indian designs are good examples of this, providing both excellent stone usage and optimizing the design to properly show off the diamonds.

Design options for diamonds

Traditional designs may not be particularly fashionable at any given moment, but they do set a design standard, and a very necessary standard. The typical diamond design, actually, is a modern invention. Old jewelry was often almost Baroque in its opulence, and not confined to the simplistic designs which are the usual stock in trade today, despite the emphasis on high carat values in traditional diamond cutting.

The basic formats for diamond design include some good options for excellent display settings like bracelets, hollow cut rings, and the more articulate, less gaudy necklaces. These are bigger surface areas, and designers therefore have more scope and space to work with.

Modern designs

The modern design approach is far more open, and definitely more abstract than the traditional design motifs. Sometimes called “deco” designs, modern Western designs are more abstract, often more three-dimensional and “fire” based designs, used to show off more color and light.

What’s really important about modern diamond design options is that they’re also more flexible. Things like diamond rings are often part of an entire ensemble of matching pieces of jewelry, and cut into complementary styles.

Many new designs, ironically, involve an old style- Hollow cut. These cuts are designed to provide good support while minimizing weight, particularly for gold or platinum settings. These settings include excellent branching and filigree, combined with strong designs. They’re very efficient settings for multiple diamond mounts.

Multicolored diamond designs are also becoming very popular, notably yellow and white diamond color mixes, which are very effective on settings like platinum and gold. This mix actively enhances the spectrum of white diamonds, and creates interesting effects in relation to highly reflective settings.

Modern design has actually freed a lot of design creativity. The traditional designs remain the standard of craftsmanship, but the designers are no longer confined to the purely symmetrical or line-based designs of the past. If you really want to see what’s possible for your beautiful diamonds, talk to a jewellery designer. You’ll be stunned.

Questions? Don’t understand something someone told you about diamonds? Not sure if you should really buy that diamond? Get the most bang for your buck when buying diamonds online! Email me at diamonds@clarityofdiamonds.com and ask!

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