The Need for Appraisals

Reasons for getting an accredited appraisal are having the stone you want insured, or when you go to sell the stone, having an appraisal that verifies the stone's quality to an unsophisticated buyer and that lists the price considerably higher than you actually expect to get for the stone, which may help sell the stone.

This is a nice line of thinking as long as you are the seller and not the buyer. It is a buyer beware type of business and you should know what you're getting and should take all safeguards possible to insure you're getting what you think you are. If you're buying in a slightly dubious situation and perhaps are not as concerned with the stone's pedigree as some people would be, you should be prepared to never see the seller again and live or die on your evaluation of the stone, not a piece of paper from an appraiser.

It should also be pointed out that in certain situations one would not want to take a stone in to an appraiser. I will leave this to the imagination of the reader.

Although appraisals are intended for an insurance company's benefit, one should realize that if an insured stone is stolen or otherwise destroyed, the insurance company may want additional information regarding the purchase of the stone along with an independent appraisal. There are exceptions to this rule. If this stone was a gift or was left to one in an estate, obviously an appraisal becomes the primary instrument of value determination and, as such, is extremely useful to have on hand.

As a sidebar here, there are ways of destroying or damaging a diamond, even though a diamond is one of the hardest materials known to man. As previously pointed out, they are brittle. If you strike a diamond with a hammer, you'll dissolve it into useless industrial dust. If you touch a diamond to an acetylene torch of significant temperature, you will observe an extremely interesting and costly phenomenon where the diamond turns back into the same black carbon that it came from.

Graphite, in other words. Once this happens the only recourse is to hope the diamond was large enough to burn in the furnace and get some heat because there is no way of changing it back quite as readily to its crystalline form.