If you’re a charting fan and liked your Algebra II and calculus classes, then diamond prices will interest you. If you try to map out the graph of diamond prices, or the displacement, you’ll get something like a steadily increasing slightly slanted stair case for the diamond price as weight, or carat, increases. Unfortunately for two-dimensional space, you can only plot one variable at a time on a standard Cartesian coordinate system graph, making diamond prices pretty elusive when it comes to plotting them visually into a shape. This is because, when it comes to diamond prices, there are actually four variables. There’s the cut, the clarity, the color, and the carat, already discussed. Starting with the last, the carat is simply the weight of the diamond. The diamond price will raise like a slanted stair case at different intervals and jump rapidly as the carat weight hits certain thresholds. This pattern in diamond prices will continue, steadily increasing and then jumping every carat until the six carat mark, where things just get way out of control and diamonds become specialty items.
If we introduce another variable into the graph and create a z-axis, we can start to build a three dimensional graph and begin to develop a very morphy and trip-inducing diamond price graph that will look like something out of Woodstock or China just before the Opium Wars. Say we introduce color in the mix. As the z-axis gets more vivid in color, the price jumps exponentially as well, but not in jumps. Color affects price exponentially and smoothly, so as our diamond price graph is expanding like a staircase up to 6 carats, the staircase is curving sharply up as we move along the z-axis of color. In order to graph this diamond price function, you’ll need a TI-89 at least, if it’s still called that ever since I graduated high school.
The clarity also pushes diamond prices up exponentially, but in order to graph that, we would need to be in hyperspace, a four-dimensional world that we don’t have access to as three-dimensional beings. The clarity, by the way, is the physical perfection of the stone, whether there are impurities, cracks, or other interferences in the lattice. The clearer, the pricier thediamond price.
Finally there is cut. Since people like sparkles, they are willing to pay more for a more sparkly stone. The more proportional the cut is, the more it refracts light and the more it sparkles, and the higher the diamond price. Cuts vary from poor to ideal, again increasing geometrically with each grading. Conclusion, don’t buy the perfect diamond. Too costly, and too much karma, or ayin harah, as they say in Hebrew. Read The Pearl by Steinbeck to learn more about that.
