Fancy coloured diamonds

For centuries, the perfect diamond has been described as colourless. However diamonds can take on all the colours of the rainbow, from colourless to yellow, orange, red, violet, green, blue, purple and even black. Diamonds of a definite colour are extremely rare. Natural coloured diamonds are basically a beautiful “freak of nature”.

The origins of these many colours are to be found in the atomic structure of the stone. Pink and red fancies are actually deformed diamonds. Defects in their crystal lattice structure change their colour. Blue and yellow diamonds have trace elements of boron and nitrogen in their make up. While it is known which chemical processes cause colour changes, researchers are still not sure why some diamonds change colour and other diamonds do not.