New
Inside VHENY
Based in the heart of Antwerp, VHENY Diamonds aims to satisfy your needs in polished and rough diamonds at a competitive price.
ReadThe Diamond Guide
Journal
Latest news, features and the working knowledge of the house — from the four Cs and the grading scales to the great stones of history, the craft of the cut and the trade behind the stone. Knowledge, shared.
Industry
Conflict Diamonds
What "blood diamonds" really are, the wars they funded, and the questions the trade still wrestles with.
Grading
Diamond Grading
An introduction to evaluating a diamond — the trained eye, the discipline it asks for, and the four characteristics that decide a stone's worth.
Jewellery
Engagement
Personalise your own ring in the heart of the diamond district — wholesale stones, and guidance on every choice.
Fancy Colours
Fancy Colours
Past the bottom of the white scale lies the rarest realm of all — diamonds graded not by absence of colour but by its presence.
Polishing
From Rough to Polished
The three-step journey — cleaving or sawing, bruting, then the blocking, brillianteering and polishing that bring out the fire.
Pricing
Pricing
A diamond is worth what someone will pay for it — yet every week the trade publishes the lists that turn that truth into a number.
History
The Diamond Timeline
Four thousand years of fascination — from a Sanskrit manuscript to the mines of Africa and Russia.
Mining
The Occurrence of Diamonds
Carbon, crystal habit and the deep-earth furnace — how a diamond comes to exist.
✦ Facts & Figures
Worldwide Nº1
Antwerp — where more than 80% of the world's diamonds change hands.
New
A New Diamond Museum Opens in Antwerp
The city of diamonds opens its story to the public — a museum for Antwerp's oldest craft.
Jewellery
Choose Your Diamond
The buyer's short course in the four Cs — and finding the shape that matches the wearer.
Fancy Colours
Colour & Intensity
The ladder from Faint to Fancy Vivid — and why intensity, more than size, decides a coloured diamond's worth.
Mining
Diamond Deposit Types
Primary kimberlite pipes and the secondary alluvial deposits the rivers carried them to.
✦ Facts & Figures
Every Diamond
Nearly every diamond on earth passes through one Antwerp street.
History
Famous Diamonds
The legendary stones that marked their time — Cullinan, Hope, Koh-i-Nûr and the Regent.
✦ Hall of Fame
One Rock, Like No Other
A diamond crystal is nature's most improbable masterpiece — pure carbon, ordered under unimaginable pressure, and never the same shape twice.
Pricing
Polished Diamonds
Begin with the Rapaport base price — then adjust up or down for cut, the placement of inclusions and the pull of fluorescence.
Polishing
The 10 Most Famous Cuts
Ten cuts that define the craft, from Tolkowsky's round brilliant to the romantic cushion.
Grading
The 4Cs in Detail
Colour, Clarity, Cut and Carat — and the atomic story beneath them, where nitrogen and boron decide what a diamond can be.
Industry
The Kimberley Process
The certification scheme that made rough diamonds among the most audited resources on earth.
Grading
Cut
The only C made by hand — and the one that decides whether a diamond truly comes alive. Proportion, symmetry and polish, and the light they set free.
Polishing
Fancy Cuts
The wider world of cuts — the ancestors of the brilliant, the rose cuts, and the small-stone cuts.
Fancy Colours
Fancy Yellow
The canary diamond — where nitrogen's warmth deepens from a flaw into the prize.
Mining
Mining Processes
Pipe mining and alluvial mining — from the batea and the Long Tom to the modern washing pan.
Jewellery
Personalise Your Ring
From the vena amoris to the final metal — every decision that makes a ring yours.
Pricing
Rough Diamonds
Pricing the unpolished stone — ADTEC lists, the costs and risks discounted from the base, and the difficult art of buying parcels.
✦ Hall of Fame
Sightholder
The privileged few invited to buy the world's rough at first hand.
✦ Facts & Figures
The Earth
From deep inside the earth — born in cooling magma at 1,300°C and 70,000 atmospheres, then carried up through ancient volcanic pipes.
New
The Perfect Match
Every shape carries a character — here is how to find the one that matches the wearer.
Industry
Treatments, Synthetics & Imitations
HPHT, irradiation, laser drilling and the rest — how diamonds are enhanced or imitated, and how the lab tells.
Jewellery
Buy on a Budget
Where to spend and where to save — balancing the four Cs to a number that suits you.
Grading
Colour
Why the rarest white diamonds are the most colourless of all — and how the D-to-Z scale reads the faint warmth most stones carry.
✦ Hall of Fame
Diamond Office
Behind the curtains of the world's greatest diamond centre.
Pricing
Diamonds Over 5cts
Why the largest stones leave the price list behind — and answer instead to rarity, the saleroom and the patience of the few who buy them.
Fancy Colours
Fancy Pink
Among the rarest of all — a colour born not of an impurity but of the crystal's own distortion.
Industry
Important Diamond Institutions
The laboratories, bourses and bodies that set the standards the whole trade runs on.
ReadMining
Risks in Investing
A clear-eyed look at the risks of buying diamonds as an investment.
Read Grading
Clarity
Most diamonds look flawless to the naked eye. Under the loupe, they tell the story of how they grew — read on a scale from Flawless to Included.
Fancy Colours
Fancy Blue
Boron's gift — the semi-conducting blue that nature alone can make.
✦ Hall of Fame
King Louis XVI
The French crown jewels — and the blue that vanished in the Revolution.
Jewellery
Metals
White, yellow, rose gold and platinum — how the metal flatters the stone.
Pricing
Type IIa Diamonds
The nitrogen-free 1.8% — the purest diamonds nature makes, the most sought after of all, and the names that set records at auction.
Pricing
Calibrated Diamonds
Stones cut to exact, computer-monitored proportions for jewellery and watch work — and why that precision carries a premium.
Read Grading
Carat
Carat measures weight, not size — and weight, more than any other C, drives price. Where the unit comes from, and the formula that catches an imitation.
✦ Hall of Fame
De Beers
The house that shaped the modern diamond trade.
Fancy Colours
Fancy Green
Written into the stone by the earth's own radiation — and notoriously hard to keep through the cut.
Jewellery
Setting Types
Prong, bezel, tension, channel and more — how the stone is held, and what each setting gives and asks.
Fancy Colours
Fancy Brown
Champagne and cognac — the warmest, most wearable of the fancy colours.
Pricing
Fancy Shapes
Priced off the Rapaport pear list — and why Princess, Cushion and Radiant can command a premium over the market.
Grading
Fluorescence
The soft glow some diamonds give under ultraviolet light — sometimes a flaw, sometimes a quiet favour to a tinted stone.
Jewellery
Ring Types
Solitaire to halo — the classic ring silhouettes and the feeling each one carries.
Grading
Shapes
Ten classic outlines, each with its own character — from the classic round brilliant to the romantic cushion and the dramatic marquise.
Jewellery
Wedding Bands
Made to sit beside your engagement ring — matched, or designed from a picture of your own.
Grading
Diamond Anatomy
Table, crown, girdle, pavilion, culet — the vocabulary of a polished diamond, and the parts a grade is built from.
Jewellery
Ring Manufacturing
From a wax or CAD model to the finished piece — how a ring is actually made.
Grading
Proportions, Symmetry & Polish
The finish behind the cut — the proportion ranges that separate an excellent stone from an average one, set out grade by grade.
ReadJewellery
Ring Sizes
Getting the fit right — measuring, the sizing standards, and why a resize is nothing to fear.
Grading
Grading Equipment
The grader's bench — the loupe, the lamp, the balances and the comparison set that turn perception into a repeatable reading.
ReadGrading
Courses, Labs & Certificates
Where graders are trained and stones are certified — GIA and HRD, and why a laboratory report is the surest way to know a diamond's worth.
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