Some time ago a friend told me that she was invited to an exclusive viewing of some jewelry that would be coming out in a year or two and would be a new trend. Rough diamonds in Jewelry. If you’ve seen the Talisman Collection @ DeBeers, or similar jewelry, then you know what I’m talking about. It has found its way into an article in The Wall Street Journal.

The Journal reports that rough diamonds are featured in a Frank Gehry design at Tiffanys and are now selling at the Jewelry section of Bergdorf Goodman & Neimann Marcus. They also interviewed Tom Moses at GIA who expressed his concern:

But because some of the usual key standards for assessing a diamond’s value, such as cut and clarity, don’t apply to uncut stones, it can be tough for consumers to evaluate pricing. “It’s pretty much a blind purchase for consumers,” says Tom Moses, a senior vice president at Gemological Institute of America, which set the widely used “4C” standards (cut, color, carat and clarity) for cut diamonds. The institute doesn’t have a system for evaluating uncut diamonds.

A statistic that surprised me… one in five pieces of Jewelry sold at the DeBeers store feature rough diamonds.