Brilliance Tools Tutorial

How our brilliance tools work

When one holds a diamond with tweezers it's hard to tell where the white light is coming from.

Early diamond cutters used color paper against the diamond to examine light return. In the eighties, in Japan a tool was developed to examine brilliance in a controlled environment but was designed mainly for ideal cut Rounds. From that concept we developed the DBL-10 and the Delta Pro to accommodate all diamond shapes*. We made them elegant, affordable and easy to use.

Why a pink (reddish pink) Reflector? During our examination and testing of other colors we found the following: the Blue is dark and difficult to distinguish from the viewer's shadow (black/light return). Yellow and Orange are too light and difficult to distinguish with White (total leakage). Green works with white diamonds and does best with pink & yellow diamonds.

 Light Return Mechanism

Light Return Mechanism
Light Return Mechanism
Light Return Mechanism - Light return from all around, 0° - 75°
Light Return Mechanism - Light return from the viewer's shadow, 75° - 90°
Light Return Mechanism - Partial light return / partial leakage
Light Return Mechanism - Strong leakage, white light from below
Light Return Mechanism

Place a diamond(s) on the stick and cover it with the Reflector, adjust the focus** and view through the lens. Slide the stick to left or right to center the stone. A well cut stone should reflect the surrounding light; the Reflector being pink will reflect PINK all around. The BLACK you see is the light return from the shadow of the viewer and should come mainly from the pavilion main facets in the case of rounds. Most other shapes show little or no viewer's shadow because of different proportions. PALE PINK is partial light return as the WHITE from below blends with the PINK above. WHITE is total leakage, there is no pink reflection when you see white light from below. On a mounted diamond you may see the color of the metal or dark spots.

 Light Return Mechanism

Why Brilliance is important?

A diamond is beautiful when it performs and it performs through light in three ways: Brilliance, Fire, and Scintillation.

1) Brilliance is the reflected ambient light that makes a diamond look brilliant. The more a diamond looks white, the more appealing it is. When a diamond has poor brilliance (light return) like the Shallow or Deep cut stones above where there is huge light loss the diamond will look smaller in diameter in the case of the deep cut stone and will look dull (Fish eye) in the case of the shallow cut stone. These two stones will not perform in Fire and Scintillation as well.

2) Fire: when WHITE LIGHT disperses into colors, like with a prism.

3) Scintillation: When the light jumps from facet to facet when one moves a diamond around, to or away from the light source.

To take pictures with our brilliance tools all you need is a short legged tripod (to purchase it on the internet use the key word: velbon df mini). Place the digital camera in macro mode at 90 degrees over the Reflector's lens, focus and click. You may hook up the camera to a TV monitor for easier focusing. Use the self timer of the camera to avoid blurry pictures. Every camera is different so try different apertures and speeds until you get it right.

 Light Return Mechanism

*If you are not sure you have the right focus we offer different size ideal cut CZs (5mm, 6mm, 7mm & 8mm) item #CZS-11 for example if you have a 1.30 Ct diamond, calibrate the focus with the 7mm CZ. After a while you will know you have it right without the CZs.

**Delta Pro has 4 sticks for most diamond shapes and the DBL has 2 sticks for rounds and squares with different size seats.

Brilliance = Light Return
Total Leakage = Strong Leakage
Partial Light Return = Partial Leakage

 Light Return Mechanism