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They’re known by diamond buyers for their grading reports and certificates, but they provide a range of services for the jewelry industry such as testing precious metals, inscribing diamonds, and providing educational resources.įor natural diamonds, GCAL has four reports: GCAL opened its doors in 2001 and is headquartered in New York City. Let’s compare GCAL versus IGI diamond certifications, including an overview of each laboratory, how their reports are different, and why we recommend you purchase a diamond certified by more reputable labs. Two institutions that certify and grade diamonds are the Gem Certification & Assurance Lab (GCAL) and the International Gemological Institute (IGI). That way, you can have confidence a diamond has the qualities stated by the seller. The average buyer has difficulty distinguishing traits such as cut, color, and clarity, so third-party organizations have expert gemologists that do this work for you. Neither GIA nor AGS grade Hearts & Arrows.Diamond certifications validate its qualities across the characteristics that most impact the value of a diamond.
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Infact HRD is one of the very few labs who actually grade Hearts & Arrows diamonds accurately. IGI is very popular in India and Middle East. There are many jewellers who are also apprehensive of selling diamonds with IGI certificates - especially in the developed countries - because they know there will be someone there who will shoot this down - out of jealousy that they didn't get to make the sale.
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Everyone thinks IGI is another EGL - but on the contrary. Like they say - You never get a second chance to make a first impression. That and with the history of IGI - they started off as a lab who would be slightly lenient with their grading - but not so much any more. There are a lot of people sitting on internet advising on diamonds with a great authority without actually having seen enough diamonds to advise what they are advising about. I think IGI tend to cop a bit of unfair criticism in the diamond forum world by well meaning.but not necessarily well informed.armchair experts - and unfortunately, more often than not it's the end consumer that can miss out on some really nice stones because they've read online somewhere to stay away from anything other than GIA or AGS (in the USA). Hey mate - IGI are pretty spot on with GIA for colour and SI1+ clarity goods.SI2s?.hmmm.ok maybe you'd want to take a close look to be sure (in my personal experience) - but overall, like Barry said, they're pretty solid. Not that that's a particularly good reason to pick it and it could easily be offset by the things in the paragraph above. In pure replacement type valuation, the GIA one is going to cost a little more to replace because it's over 1.50cts and there's a premium for that. That’s from the same dealers, the same lab, and on the same day. A 1.5-1.6/J/SI2/GIA/round search in the database produces 267 offers with a range of more than a factor of 2 in price. I’m more inclined to ask about details you didn’t bother to mention. Other services, like the little ‘credit card’ appraisals, vary a lot. The stones graded in their India operations seem to vary a lot. The IGI labs in New York and Hong Kong seem to do a pretty good job when examining unmounted stones. That leads to one of those answers with a ton of qualifiers.
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They also have several different labs and, like EGL, I don’t count them as equal. This is vastly more complicated than just lab differences.įor starters, IGI offers a number of different documents.