Cutting diamonds is a serious business - obviously they don’t just come out of the ground in the form you see them in the ring. The act of cutting and polishing the various facets is an art of exact dimensions and angles. A diamond featuring ideal proportions will reflect light back towards you, creating optimum sparkle.

When you see a diamond from the side too much depth means loss of light through exterior facets. Too shallow and light is lost through the girdle facets. The diagram above shows you exactly the sort of stone shape you need to be looking for.

Once you’ve established your ideal proportions, you need to consider the actual shape of your stone. The one you have in your mind’s eye is almost definitely the brilliant-cut, the classic vaguely round shape that's on every advertisement and movie. However, as you’ll see from the diagram above, there are others such as the Princess or Emerald cuts. Each have their own properties and each has its place in the various settings you could choose.

At Temprell we rigorously select our diamonds for cuts. We’re constantly on the lookout for the very best in terms of artistry and brilliance - we never buy anything but the very best. Which means, even if you aren’t a qualified diamond grader, you can rest assured that your diamond isn’t just the real thing but the best real thing.

The generally accepted idea of a diamond is the classic absolutely pure polished ice conception - flashing tiny rainbows under candlelight. However, like almost everything else diamonds come in variations of colour. Grade D indicates a perfectly colourless diamond with Z being a diamond markedly tinted. Colour distinctions are so subtle from grade to grade they are often unoticeable to the untrained eye but the practical guidance offered by Temprell will have you confident in your choice.

Since it is those diamonds at the top end of the scale that emit the all important flash of beauty, exceptional white and rare white are the ones chosen by Temprell for our engagement rings. We want your ring to catch the eye of everyone in the room and, for that reason, only the whitest diamonds form the centrepiece of our engagement rings.

No two diamonds are the same, even when they have an identical cut weight and colour-grade. What makes them different is their clarity, the various properties imparted to the stone as it was forged under pressure and heat in the earth millions of years ago. Normally this takes the guise of other minerals having been present at the stones formation, disrupting the alignment of atoms as the crystal forms and changing the refractive qualities of areas within it.

Sometimes this can be so extreme as to create a wave of dullness through the stone, other times it creates internal fractures. At Temprell we hand select stones that are flawless to the naked eye which depending on the carat weight starts around SI1 and above. Only somebody trained would discern anything shy of perfection, even under magnification.

Many people believe that carats refer to the size of a stone. Indeed whenever we refer to carat its normally accompanied by a comment about the proportions of the stone in question. However, what we’re actually referring to here is weight.

As a general rule of thumb, the higher the carat, the higher the value of the stone. That said, any jeweller will tell you that its better to have a higher quality small diamond than a poor large one. In diamonds, as in life, size might be important but it isn’t everything.