Are you buying new diamonds earring? Or have you inherited a vintage pair of earrings from your grandmother? Either way, we’ll help you make sure the diamonds on your hands are genuine. Diamonds have no competition when it comes to worthiness and grandeur. But, unfortunately, those qualities contribute to the fact that purchasing them is highly stressful since it’s a lifetime investment.
It’s especially challenging when fake diamonds are roaming the market. Luckily, we’ll give you all the information you need about real diamond earrings vs. fake ones, including detailed tests to try out. So let’s jump in!
Real Diamond Earrings vs. Fake: How to Tell the Difference
The unprecedented popularity of diamonds led many people to produce copycats using less costly materials, like cubic zirconia. Manufacturers also use many diamond alternatives, such as white sapphire and white topaz, and emeralds (see best emerald earrings).
The main issue is that people don’t know how to tell the difference. And taking into account the high prices of diamonds, buying a fake would be a big fraud.
Luckily, there are many tests to tell if a diamond is real (see also diamond earrings’ settings). Here’s a brief roundup about some of the experiments you can try for both mounted and loose diamonds.
Mounted Diamonds
If your earrings (see best cartilage hoop earrings) are intact and the diamonds are already mounted, you can try the following tests.
The Fog Test
This test is pretty straightforward and relatively accurate. All you have to do is put the diamond earring in front of your mouth and breathe hot air onto its surface. If it doesn’t fog, then you’re in luck, and your diamond is authentic. However, if it fogs for a few seconds, you have a fake diamond (see best fake diamond earrings).
Natural diamonds disperse heat quickly, so they don’t fog up as easily as fake ones.
The Magnifying Glass Test
Genuine diamonds often have imperfect patterns that people refer to as inclusions. They appear clearly once you look at a diamond using a magnifying glass or a loupe. So, if you look at your diamond earring (see diamond studs for women) and notice that the stone is suspiciously perfect, you might have a fake diamond.
The only condition where this test won’t be accurate is if your mounted diamond is created in a lab or costs a fortune. This is because those are usually flawless diamonds.
The Scratch test
All you’ll need for this test is sandpaper. Once you get it, you should rub the rough side of it against your earring. You don’t need to worry though, if you have a real diamond earring, the sandpaper won’t affect it a bit.
Diamonds are extremely hard, so the mere hardness of sandpaper that records an average of eight on the Mohs scale won’t damage it. That said, if you have a fake diamond, it’ll scratch.
The Sparkle Test
To test a stone’s authenticity, you can see how it refracts and reflects light. For example, fake diamonds reflect light and give off a colored light sparkle. Meanwhile, mined diamonds reflect light in gray tones. Try putting your earring under a sunray or a lamp and see what the reflection will tell you.
The Mount Test
You can tell whether your diamond earring is authentic or not by looking at the mount. Professional jewelers often place natural diamonds in valuable mounts, for example, platinum or white gold (see earrings for sensitive ears and best earrings for newly pierced ears). Luckily, there’s an apparent visual stamp that you can look at to make sure. For instance, if your stamp shows CZ, your earring is cubic zirconia. The same goes if you have a diamond ring.
Visit a Jewelry Store
If you don’t want to go through the headache of testing your diamond or gold earring yourself (see best gold earrings), you can visit a trusted jeweler. Most jewelers can detect a real diamond and precious metals in no time, and they’ll be more than happy to help. They might even help you free of charge.
The best part is that their results are always accurate because they have specific equipment for such tests. For example, most jewelers own a diamond tester, which is a thermal conductivity probe.
They use it to determine the stone’s thermal conductivity as genuine diamonds are perfect heat conductors that release heat immediately. If they notice a slow heat dispersing rate, you might have some fake stones.
Loose Diamonds
If you’ve removed the diamonds from your pair of earrings (see also best helix earrings), it’ll be much easier for you to tell whether they’re real. Here are the tests you can try out.
The Water Test
You can start with this test as it’s easy and takes no time. Look for a drinking glass and fill most of it with water.
Then, carefully drop your loose diamond inside. If the stone floats at the surface or underneath the water, you own fake diamonds. If it sinks, you’re in luck because real diamonds have high density, so they never float.
It’s worth mentioning that this test isn’t too accurate because not all fake diamonds float.
The Heat Test
Natural diamonds don’t get shattered by heat, while fake ones do. So this test will help you know whether your diamond is genuine by putting the stone under tremendous heat. That said, this test is a bit dangerous, so you should take care while trying it. It’d also be best if you wear proper safety gear.
All you have to do is heat your diamond using a propane torch for nearly 40 seconds. Next, drop it in cold water abruptly. The pressure and expansion will only shatter your diamond if it’s fake.
UV Light Test
If you have a UV lamp, you can try this test to tell if a diamond is real. However, it isn’t highly accurate, so you shouldn’t trust it completely.
To be sure, carry out another test along with it.
Place your loose stone under UV light and see what color it emits. If you have a genuine diamond, it might radiate a blue-colored hue. However, some authentic diamonds don’t emit any color under this light.
The Dot Test
To tell if a diamond is real, you can place a white piece of paper on your desk and draw a dot on it. Next, put your stone, flat side down, onto the paper and look through its other end. Your diamond is real if you fail to see the dot or any reflection. On the other hand, if you see the dot or a circular reflection, then you might have landed a synthetic diamond.
This is because a natural diamond can refract light so powerfully that light rays will move in different directions. As a result, you won’t be able to see anything through it.
Real Diamonds vs. Lab-Created Diamonds
Many people believe that lab-created diamonds are fake; however, they’re as real as mined diamonds. They’re merely manufactured in different conditions. That said, there are some differences that you should know about.
Real diamonds form under coincidental conditions in nature, so they aren’t anywhere near perfect. If you look at them through a loupe, you’ll notice they have many inclusions, while lab-created ones are perfectly symmetrical.
This is because they’re created using specific techniques like chemical vapor deposition. And they take nearly three months to form, while true diamonds may take thousands of years.
Real Diamonds vs. Moissanite
To clear things up, moissanite isn’t among synthetic diamonds. Instead, it’s a naturally occurring stone that resembles diamond significantly. Henri Moissan discovered it inside a meteor, and he thought it was a diamond at first. But, later on, he found out that those stones mainly consist of silicon carbide, not carbon.
Since moissanite stones are too challenging to find in nature, they’re mostly made in labs nowadays. To know the difference between the best diamond studs and moissanite, you should put them in front of a lamp and check the colored light they emit. Moissanite stones disperse light twice as much as diamonds, so they often give off rainbow colors. Meanwhile, diamonds emit whiter light.
You can also check the stone’s weight. Diamonds – check out best teardrop earrings – are much heavier than their counterparts, moissanite stones. However, this test may require a visit to a professional jeweler because they often have sensitive weighing scales and know precisely how to carry out the test.
It’s worth mentioning that moissanite stones have the same thermal conductivity qualities as authentic diamonds. As a result, you won’t detect them using a diamond tester.
To Wrap Up
There are many ways that you can use to tell whether your diamond is real or not. We all know how bad it is of a feeling to flaunt the precious diamonds on your earrings – see also cartilage earrings – only to find later on that they’re fake. To avoid going through this situation, you can try out the fog test, the heat test, or look through your diamond using a loupe or a magnifying glass.