What is diamond color and how is it measured? 

Color grading actually assesses the lack of color in a white diamond. In nature, most white diamonds have a slight tint of yellow. The closer to being ‘colorless’ the stone is, the rarer it is and therefore the more valuable it is. Color grading evaluates each stone against a master set and assigns a letter grade from D (colorless) to Z (light yellow).

Color is considered the second most important of the 4C’s (next to cut) because of its impact on the stone's appearance, with a grade lower in the alphabet appearing with a yellow tinge, rather than brilliant white at the top of the alphabet. 

Every white Lightbox lab-grown diamond has been measured as near colorless. This is technically defined as between G and J and means that only a trained gemologist can detect a trace of color.

What are colored diamonds?

Natural diamonds also occur in shades of yellow-orange, blue, green, pink, red and black -- but do not mistake these stones with the color associated with white diamonds. Colored or fancy colored diamonds are very rare and precious when found in nature, and therefore come with a high price tag. 

One of the great advantages of Lightbox lab-grown diamonds is that they can be made in an array of colors, and these colored stones share the same price as their white lab-grown diamond counterparts -- always $800 a carat. 

Creating colored stones in the lab is achieved by making changes in the gas mix added to the CVD reactor combined with treatments to these stones applied at the end of the synthesis process. The resulting Lightbox stones are available in shades of blush pink and powder blue. The process might sound simple, but it's taken our scientists thousands of hours to perfect.