Shedding Light on Fancy White

Not to be confused with colorless stones, diamonds of this rare hue owe their opalescent shimmer to micro-inclusions and are driving designers to scour the globe for specimens.

Retailers are forever strategizing new ways to market their diamonds to a selective clientele. Often, that includes bringing lesser-known varieties to the fore and then teaching collectors how to appreciate them. The trade witnessed this decades back with brown diamonds, which used to get chucked aside for industrial application until imaginative marketing efforts in the early 1980s used handles like “chocolate,” “champagne” and “cognac” to entice collectors. More recently, salt-and-pepper diamonds have found an enthusiastic audience among young shoppers.
Now, fancy-white diamonds are piquing the interest of diamond collectors as more of them emerge in the retail landscape.

Who wants them?
When traditional diamond fans speak of craving “white” diamonds, what they actually want are the closest to D-color, or colorless, diamonds that they can afford. But in this instance, we’re referring to stones with an actual white body color, a fascinating subset of the fancy-diamond market.
“They appear in a broad spectrum of qualities — anything that is sleepy, milky and not clear,” says Alan Bronstein, president of the Natural Color Diamond Association (NCDIA). “The cloudy stones graded fancy white will exhibit coloration from milky to cream.”

These diamonds’ mesmeric appearance — a delicate translucency that often mimics moonstone’s play of color — makes them a stand-out option. However, when they first made their way onto the market in the early 1980s, they generated more curiosity than excitement, Bronstein recalls.
Gemstone author Renee Newman confirms this assessment. Years ago, she worked for a wholesaler in the diamond district of Los Angeles, California, and fancy-white stones were undesirable at the time. “I had to extract those white diamonds from parcels I was sorting in the 1980s,” she relates. But timing is everything, and today, they are capturing a zeitgeist among diamond lovers.

Elusive sources
Innovative stone dealers and designers were early adopters of this unfamiliar category. Award-winning jewelry artist Michael Jakubowski got hooked on the puzzling milky diamonds years ago. “I first learned there was such a diamond after I saw a photo in Gems & Gemology 20 years back. I had to look up what it was. At that moment, I knew I just had to have one, since I’ve always collected odd, unusual and rare gems.”

Indeed, “white diamonds are very, very rare,” according to Daniel Nyfeler, managing director of the Gübelin Gem Lab. “They are significantly less commercial than other fancy-colored diamonds, and so there is almost no demand for gemological reports.”

Graduate gemologist and stone dealer Elaine Rohrbach has been collecting unusual gems for 35 years. For her, “rarity doesn’t just mean what the material is, it can also refer to its origin.” One of her “pets,” as she calls it, is a 1.68-carat, fancy-white alluvial rough diamond she acquired serendipitously during an early trip to the Diamantina-Crystalina area of Minas Gerais, Brazil — a site celebrated the world over for its extraordinary quartz crystals.

“It was totally unexpected. I was ecstatic when a garimpos (small-scale miner) offered me this with two other diamond crystals from the area…not something on my shopping list,” she recounts. Since there is no kimberlite mining in this part of Brazil, the garimpos explained, any diamonds found there are alluvial, possibly in or near riverbeds fed by runoff from the gold mines upstream.

But fancy whites aren’t exclusive to Brazil. Some of the first such diamonds that the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) encountered were reportedly from India, Jakubowski notes.
He recalls hunting for white diamonds decades ago. “Way back when an eminent online auction site was in its infancy, I was scouring for good gemstone deals and managed to win a small (under 0.50-carat) pear-shaped, semi-translucent white diamond. I couldn’t have been happier.”
Despite keeping his radar up, he didn’t find another one until about three or four years ago during a JCK Las Vegas show. “This time, it was a much more transparent round brilliant of 0.75 carats from a colored-diamond broker I’ve previously done business with.”

Born to stand out
Jakubowski believes white diamonds’ allure hinges on “the way light gets scattered by the internal nano-inclusions, giving them an ethereal appearance not unlike a gossamer fairy’s dress.”
This neutral stone presents creative opportunities for designers. “Definitely use white metals, with dramatically contrasting accents, if any,” Jakubowski advises, citing one of his rings with a black-diamond surround. He also points out that some fancy-white diamonds have a grayish or yellowish tint, in which case, cool- or warm-toned accent stones can be an attractive complement.

At a time when consumers are spoiled for diamond choices, offering a fancy-white one can be just the ticket to attracting those who may not warm up to traditional diamonds — particularly millennial shoppers who want their jewelry to reflect their individuality. Fancy whites are statement-makers with a wraithlike draw, and Bronstein believes that for those who appreciate them, “rarity will dominate over traditional beauty.”

FACTS AND FEATURES
• Natural white diamonds are classified as fancy-colored diamonds, rather than as colorless ones that are included or “milky.”

• These diamonds exhibit a distinct white body color, which is the sum of all colors on the spectrum.

• Unlike most colors, which stem from defects on the atomic level, this white is thought to result from nanometer- to micrometer-sized inclusions that reduce the stone’s transparency by scattering or absorbing light.

• The scattering of light often gives these stones an opalescent appearance, with pastel flashes of color that are most evident when the stone is face-up.

• There is no manufactured version of this natural anomaly.

Main image: Michael Jakubowski 14-karat white gold ring set with a 0.75-carat fancy white diamond and black diamond surround.