Diamond Cut Grade Chart: Ideal vs Excellent vs Very Good, What Each Costs and How a Diamond Is Cut

By Cameron Malakan, owner of Clairamor and third-generation jeweler · Published February 4, 2023 · Updated October 12, 2026

A diamond's cut grade measures how well it was cut, not what shape it is. GIA grades standard round brilliants on a five-step scale from Excellent to Poor, weighing brightness, fire, scintillation, weight ratio, durability, polish and symmetry, and IGI, which reports nearly every stone in our picker, puts Ideal above Excellent on a round. Ovals, cushions, emerald cuts and the other fancy shapes carry no cut grade on either laboratory's report, only polish and symmetry grades. In lab-grown diamonds the top grades are the ordinary stock, not the exception: of the 9,994 rounds between 1 and 3 carats in Clairamor's picker on October 12, 2026, 24 percent were Ideal, 71 percent Excellent and 5 percent Very Good, and an Ideal cost at most $54 more than an Excellent at any weight from 1 to 3 carats, and less at 2 and 3 carats. So the advice is short: buy an Excellent or Ideal cut with Excellent polish and symmetry, glance at the depth and table, and let the video settle the rest. This guide, which replaces three earlier posts on cut, covers what the grade measures, the chart from Excellent to Poor with Ideal and the AGS scale beside it, what each grade costs in lab-grown, the proportions behind the grade, polish, symmetry, triple excellent and hearts and arrows, what a cut grade means on an oval or a cushion, and how a diamond is cut from rough to polished. Our guide to how lab-grown diamonds last covers the other side of cut: which shapes and proportions expose a diamond to chipping and which settings protect them.

Diamond cut grades at a glance

Cut is not shape

The two words get swapped constantly, in shops as well as search boxes, so it is worth settling them first. Shape is the outline you see from above: round, oval, cushion, emerald, radiant, pear, marquise, moval. "Princess cut", "emerald cut" and "cushion cut" are shapes with the word cut attached, and when someone asks which diamond cut looks biggest or which cut is cheapest, they mean shape. Cut, in the sense a laboratory grades it, is the quality of the work: the proportions the cutter chose, the precision of the facets and the finish of their surfaces, which together decide how much of the light entering the stone comes back out of the top to your eye. GIA's own definition puts it simply: while a term like oval refers to the shape or outline, cut describes how the diamond interacts with light, including the arrangement and proportions of its facets. A round can be cut Excellent or Poor; so can an oval, though you will not find a grade for it on the report. If you came here for the shapes, our guides cover each one, with measured sizes and prices from our picker: the round brilliant, the oval, the cushion, the emerald cut, the radiant, the pear, the marquise, the Dutch marquise and the moval, with the long shapes compared side by side in the elongated shapes guide and the question of which looks biggest answered on its own page. This guide is about the grade.

Why the grade matters more than the other three Cs is a point GIA makes without hedging: an expertly cut diamond will look brilliant even with lower color and clarity grades, while a poorly cut one with top color and clarity will look dull. Cut is the only one of the 4Cs that people made rather than found, which in a lab-grown diamond is a distinction without much difference, since the growers made the crystal too; but it is also the only one that controls light. Color decides whether the stone is white, clarity whether it is clean, carat how big it is, and cut whether any of that shows. Our 4Cs page introduces all four; the color scale, the clarity chart and the carat chart each get a guide of their own, and this one completes the set.

What the cut grade measures

GIA's cut grading system for the standard round brilliant, the one every other laboratory's round grade is measured against, looks at seven things in three groups. The first group is the face-up appearance, what you see when the stone is in a ring: brightness, the white light the diamond returns from inside and from its surface; fire, the light it splits into the colors of the spectrum; and scintillation, the pattern of light and dark across the stone and the sparkle as it moves. The second group is the design: the weight ratio, which asks whether the stone's weight matches its diameter or is hidden in depth you cannot see, and durability, the risk that the proportions themselves invite damage, as a knife-edge girdle does. The third group is craftsmanship: polish, the condition of the facet surfaces, and symmetry, the exactness of the outline and the placement of the facets. The overall grade is set by the lowest mark among the first five, so a stone that scores Poor for brightness cannot grade higher than Poor whatever else it does well, while polish and symmetry are graded separately and reported on their own lines; a round with Very Good polish or symmetry can still earn an Excellent cut grade if its proportions and light performance are exceptional. GIA says the system took fifteen years to build, from computer modeling of tens of thousands of proportion combinations tested against more than 70,000 observations of real diamonds by real people, and it went onto reports in January 2006. Its most useful feature is that each grade is a range of proportion sets rather than one recipe, so two Excellent rounds can look slightly different from each other and both be Excellent, which is also why the grade is a filter rather than a final answer.

IGI grades a round on the same three ideas, polish, symmetry and proportions, and its top grade is Ideal, printed as Excellent-Ideal in its own description of the scale; for the rounds that reach it IGI can add a light performance report that scores light return, brightness, fire and contrast. The AGS scale, the oldest cut grade of all, runs from 0 to 10 with 0 called Ideal, and since the American Gem Society's laboratory became part of GIA at the end of 2022 the AGS Ideal report is issued by GIA as a supplement for rounds that already carry Excellent cut, polish and symmetry, measuring brightness, fire and contrast from the center of the stone to its edge. Three laboratories, then, and three ways of saying the same thing at the top of the scale: GIA Excellent, IGI Ideal and AGS 0 are all the best grade their system gives a round, and the differences between them are differences of method, not of what the stone looks like on a hand.

The diamond cut grade chart

The chart below lines the three scales up and adds what each grade looks like, how much of our round inventory sat in it on October 12, 2026 (9,994 rounds between 1 and 3 carats, D to G color and IF to VS2 clarity, which is everything we stock), and what we would do with it. Our picker's cut filter runs from Ideal to Very Good, so the three lowest grades are described here for completeness and are not in our inventory.

Two things about the chart. The AGS column gives the names AGS attached to its own numbers, 0 Ideal, 1 Excellent, 2 Very Good, 3 and 4 Good, 5 to 7 Fair and 8 to 10 Poor; the laboratories have never published a conversion between their systems, so a line across the chart is a rough equivalence, and the AGS Ideal report is now a supplement to a GIA report rather than a grading system of its own. And the shares are a lab-grown pattern, not a universal one: GIA notes that most round brilliants on the market today receive Excellent or Very Good, and in a feed of grown stones, where the rough is made for the saw rather than found, the top two grades account for 95 percent. One change to know about if you are reading a GIA report on a lab-grown stone: since October 1, 2025 GIA no longer grades the color and clarity of lab-grown diamonds, and its lab-grown report describes a stone as Premium, which on a round requires an Excellent cut along with Excellent polish and symmetry, D color and VVS2 clarity or better, or Standard; a GIA report with a full cut grade and full color and clarity grades is an older report, of which our picker held 1,063 among the rounds that day, 1,056 of them graded Excellent and none Ideal, because GIA's scale has no Ideal. Our certification guide compares the laboratories line by line.

Ideal vs Excellent vs Very Good: what the top grade is worth

In mined diamonds the top cut grade carries a real premium, because cutting a crystal to the best proportions throws away more of it, and the question of whether to pay for Excellent over Very Good is a genuine budget decision. In lab-grown it is not. The table gives the least expensive round at each weight and grade in our picker on October 12, 2026, D to G color and IF to VS2 clarity, and the finished price of each with our 14k solitaire, which is $950 before the stone. Read across a row and the grades cost about the same; read down a column and the weight is what you pay for.

The pattern is the one our round brilliant guide found the day before: the top grade costs between nothing and $54 extra, the least expensive 2 carat and 3 carat rounds of all were Ideals, and at 1.5 carats the cheapest stone happened to be a Very Good, $34 under the cheapest Excellent, which is the whole of the saving the lower grade offers. (Prices move daily as stones sell: the least expensive 3 carat round of the previous day, $1,698, was no longer listed when these were pulled.) What the grade buys instead of money is a guarantee about proportions, which the next section measures, and a slightly larger face: because a Very Good round is usually a deeper round, it is smaller across for its weight. In lab-grown, then, the choice is not Ideal versus Excellent, which the laboratories themselves treat as the same top band, but Excellent-or-better versus everything else, and the price makes that an easy call. Our lab-grown vs natural guide explains why the cut premium disappeared along with the rest of the price. Our lab-grown diamond price guide prices every weight, shape and grade from the same picker.

Proportions: depth, table, crown and pavilion

Behind every cut grade is a set of measurements, and the report prints them: the depth as a percentage of the diameter, the table as a percentage of the diameter, the crown angle and height, the pavilion angle and depth, the girdle thickness and the culet. The modern round brilliant's proportions were worked out over about fifty years. Henry Morse in Boston measured angles with a goniometer in the 1870s and his foreman built the first bruting machine, which made a truly round outline practical; American cutters were advocating pavilion angles of 40 to 42 degrees and crown angles of 35 to 37 by the early 1900s; and Marcel Tolkowsky's 1919 book Diamond Design, which traced light through the stone in two dimensions and settled on a 34.5 degree crown, a 40.75 degree pavilion and a 53 percent table, became the model the trade still calls the ideal cut. GIA's grading system does not prescribe one recipe. It maps about 38 million combinations of six proportion measures onto the five grades, and a round whose crown is a little steeper and whose pavilion is a little shallower can be as bright as Tolkowsky's and grade Excellent beside it. What the proportions tell a shopper is simpler: whether the weight you are paying for is spread across the face of the stone or buried below the girdle, and whether the stone is likely to leak light.

The table shows the median measurements of the 300 least expensive rounds at each grade and weight in our picker on October 12, 2026 (all 135 of the 1 carat Very Goods and all 82 at 2 carats), with the diameter each grade typically delivers for its weight.

Read the depth and diameter columns together and the grades explain themselves. The Ideal and Excellent rounds sit at 61 to 62 percent deep with crowns near Tolkowsky's 34.5 degrees and pavilions near 41, and they spread their weight across the face: a 2 carat Ideal measured 8.16 mm, an Excellent 8.10. The Very Good stones are deeper, 62.7 percent on average, with steeper crowns at 35.6 to 36 degrees, and they measure smaller, 8.04 mm at 2 carats, because a tenth of a millimeter of width went into depth you cannot see. GIA shows the same effect with a pair of stones that look identical face-up, one 0.61 carats and the other 0.71, the heavier one carrying its extra weight in a thicker girdle, costing more and showing nothing for it. The working rule in our carat chart stands: a round 59 to 63 percent deep with a table of 54 to 60 percent is spending its weight where you can see it, and the measurements on every listing in our picker let you check it in a second. Compare stones by millimeters as well as carats; two rounds of the same weight can differ by two tenths of a millimeter, and the wider one looks like the bigger diamond because it is.

Polish, symmetry, triple excellent and hearts and arrows

Polish and symmetry are the two craftsmanship grades, and they are reported on every shape, which makes them the only cut information a fancy-shape report carries. Polish grades the surface of the facets: an Excellent polish has no scratches, burn marks, pits or polish lines a grader can find at 10x, and light passes through the surface cleanly instead of scattering off it. Symmetry grades the geometry: whether the outline is truly round, the table centered, the facets the same size and shape as their opposite numbers and meeting where they should, the culet centered under the table and the girdle even. Both run Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair and Poor, and both are nearly a formality in a lab-grown feed cut on modern equipment: of the 9,994 rounds between 1 and 3 carats in our picker on October 12, 2026, 9,974 carried Excellent symmetry and 17 Very Good, and 9,964 carried Excellent polish and 20 Very Good. The fancy shapes run the same way: of 7,149 ovals, 6,944 had Excellent symmetry and 199 Very Good, 7,054 Excellent polish and 88 Very Good. A Very Good on either line is not a flaw you will see; GIA says a round with Very Good polish or symmetry can still earn its Excellent cut grade when its proportions and light performance are right.

Two trade terms belong here. "Triple excellent", or 3EX, is a round with Excellent cut, Excellent polish and Excellent symmetry on the same report; the phrase was first used by a Japanese laboratory on a 1994 report and has since become shorthand for the top line of a GIA report. In our picker the equivalent on an IGI report is Ideal or Excellent cut with Excellent polish and symmetry, which, on the figures above, describes nearly every round we list. "Hearts and arrows" is older and more romantic. In the late 1970s a Japanese gemologist, Kazumi Okuda, put a red ring under a loupe and noticed that a round cut to exact proportions with exact symmetry showed a pattern of eight dark arrows face-up against a red field, and eight hearts from below; a Japanese company, Japan Diamond Mind, built the FireScope around the idea in the late 1980s, and hearts-and-arrows viewers have been sold to shoppers ever since. The pattern is real and it is a sign of precise cutting, but it is not a grade, no laboratory prints it on a report, and GIA's research since then has found that the quantity of light a diamond returns is only part of what makes it look bright, the pattern of contrast as it moves being the rest. A stone sold as "super ideal" or "hearts and arrows" is a well-cut round with a marketing name; an Ideal or Excellent with Excellent polish and symmetry is as far as the paper goes, and the video shows you the rest.

Cut grades on ovals, cushions and the other fancy shapes

Here is the part of the subject that the guides which rank for "diamond cut chart" leave out. GIA gives a cut grade to the standard round brilliant only, because the round's facet pattern and light behavior are standardized and every other outline is a fancy shape whose facets and proportions vary too widely for the round's rules; an oval needs eighteen measurements to describe its faceting where a round needs six, and a pear with four pavilion mains needs thirty-five. On a GIA report an oval, a cushion or an emerald cut carries polish and symmetry grades and no cut grade. IGI, which reports nearly every stone in our picker, offers a cut grade for fancy shapes through a four-step assessment, polish and symmetry of at least Very Good, proportions inside the ranges it has published for the shape, shape-specific checks such as the bow-tie and the girdle, and a gemologist's judgment of light return, with Excellent as the top grade; but the fancy-shape reports we checked while writing this guide, ovals, a cushion and a radiant from our picker, carry polish and symmetry grades and a blank cut grade line, exactly as GIA's do. On a round, the Ideal in our picker is IGI's grade and you can read it on the report. On a fancy shape, the cut label the picker shows is the picker's own sorting label, not a laboratory grade, and we would rather tell you that than let the filter imply a precision the report does not have.

So how do you judge the cut of an oval or a cushion? The way the laboratories do, with the report's polish and symmetry grades as the first filter and the stone's own geometry and video as the second. Each shape has its own numbers: the length-to-width ratio that decides whether an oval reads long or round and whether a cushion is square or elongated, the depth that keeps a step cut from showing a window, the bow-tie that crosses an oval, a pear, a marquise or a moval when the pavilion angles are wrong. Our shape guides give the ratios, the typical depth and table, and the bow-tie checks for the oval, the cushion, the emerald cut, the radiant, the pear, the marquise and the moval, and every listing in our picker shows the measurements, the report and a video of the stone turning under light, which is the test the grade was invented to approximate. GIA's own supplement does exist for some fancy shapes: the AGS Ideal report, issued by GIA, can be requested for ovals, cushions, emerald cuts, radiants and a few other facet arrangements with Excellent polish and symmetry, and it scores brightness, fire and contrast from the center of the stone to the edge. It is rare, and none of the stones we checked carried one, but if a seller offers an oval with an AGS Ideal report, that is a cut grade worth the name.

How a diamond is cut: from rough to polished

Diamond is the hardest material there is, so it can only be cut by diamond, and the whole craft is a series of ways to make diamond grind, saw or polish diamond without breaking either one. A lab-grown crystal arrives at the cutting factory as a flat square block if it was grown by CVD or a cuboctahedron if it was grown by HPHT, and a mined one as an octahedron or a shapeless piece, and from there the process is the same. IGI's summary of it runs to six steps, and GIA's account of a visit to a large cutting factory fills in the numbers. First, planning: the rough is scanned, its outline and any inclusions mapped in three dimensions, and software works out which polished shapes it can yield and at what weight and value; a round is usually the best use of an octahedron, which is sawn off-center into a larger and a smaller stone, and a long crystal becomes a pear or a marquise. A planner's margin is small, since a difference of one degree in a cutting plane changes the finished weight by about one percent, and a strained crystal, found with a polariscope, is planned around so it does not shatter. Second, marking, which is now mostly done by the same machines that planned the stone. Third, sawing: a laser, often one that fires through a hair-thin jet of water to keep the stone cool, takes the rough apart along the planned line with less than one percent of the weight lost on larger stones; the diamond-grit saw blade that took hours still exists but is the exception in a modern factory, and lasers cut the outlines of most fancy shapes too. Fourth, bruting: the stone is spun at speed against a wheel charged with diamond grit and water, or against another diamond, until its girdle is a true circle, which takes about ten minutes for a 1 carat round, and the pavilion is ground to its angle in another quarter of an hour. Fifth, polishing, which is the slow part: on a cast-iron wheel called a scaife, charged with diamond powder and oil, the polisher holds the stone in a dop at the end of a tang and places each of the 57 facets in turn, blocking the main facets, cross-working and brillianteering the smaller ones, lifting the stone to the loupe after every touch; a 1 carat round takes about two hours of polishing, an hour for the pavilion and an hour for the crown. Sixth, inspection: the finished stone is boiled clean in acid, its cut graded under a microscope, its color checked against master stones and its clarity graded, and then it goes to the laboratory for the report that follows it to our picker and to you.

Two things about that process explain what you see on a report. The first is that cut is the one C the cutter chooses. A grower decides the color and clarity of a lab-grown crystal when the chamber is loaded, and the rough decides the carat weight the cutter can reach, but the cutter decides whether to take the Excellent proportions and lose weight or keep the weight and accept a Very Good, which is why the deep, steep stones in the table above exist: each of them was once a decision to keep a tenth of a carat. In mined rough the decision has a price, because the crystal is scarce; in grown rough, made to order in sizes that suit the saw, the cost of cutting well is small, which is why the top grades are the stock. The second is the history of the grade itself, which is shorter than the history of the cut. Cutters had been chasing an ideal since the brilliant was described in 1750, but nobody graded the result until GIA's Richard Liddicoat taught a method for evaluating proportions in 1953 as part of the grading system that also gave the trade the D-to-Z color scale; the American Gem Society introduced the first cut grade for rounds in 1966; the scanners that measure a stone's angles in seconds arrived in 1992 and made grading every round practical; and GIA's own cut grade, built on the modeling and observation study described above, went onto reports in January 2006. Our lab-grown vs natural guide covers how the crystals are grown; the page on how lab-grown diamonds are made walks through the CVD process step by step.

How to choose a well-cut diamond: the checklist

For a round, the report does most of the work. Take an Ideal or Excellent cut, which in our picker costs the same as anything lower; take Excellent polish and symmetry, which nearly every stone has; and read the depth and table, looking for about 59 to 63 percent and 54 to 60 percent, so that the weight is in the face of the stone rather than under it. Then compare by millimeters: at 1 carat a good round measures about 6.4 to 6.5 mm across, at 1.5 about 7.4, at 2 about 8.1, at 2.5 about 8.7 and at 3 about 9.3, and a stone well under those numbers for its weight is deep. Fluorescence, which mined-diamond buyers check because strong blue fluorescence can make some stones hazy, is close to absent in lab-grown, and none of the rounds we sampled for this guide listed any. Finally, watch the video on the listing, where the pattern of light and dark GIA's grade was built to measure is there to see as the stone turns. For a fancy shape, do the same with polish and symmetry, then open the shape's guide for its ratio and depth, check for a bow-tie on the long shapes and a window on the step cuts, and let the video decide between two stones the report cannot separate. What you can skip: hearts-and-arrows claims, "super ideal" labels and the difference between Ideal and Excellent, all of which describe stones already at the top of the scale. What you should not skip: the report itself, from IGI, GIA or HRD, which is on every listing we sell, and which we will send you if it is not showing. The 4Cs page covers the other three Cs in brief, and the clarity chart and the color scale go grade by grade with prices.

Where Clairamor fits

Every diamond in Clairamor's picker is lab-grown, graded Ideal, Excellent or Very Good for cut on a round, D to G for color and IF to VS2 for clarity, and listed with its measurements, its IGI, GIA or HRD report and a video, so the grades this guide describes are the only grades you will meet in our inventory. Every setting is priced without the center stone, from $950 for the 14k solitaire, and the price calculator adds any stone to any setting. The finished rings on this page start at $1,601 for a 1 carat Excellent round in the solitaire, $2,149 for a 2 carat Ideal, and $2,844 for a 3 carat Ideal, at the October 12, 2026 prices. We set the stone you choose in any of our designs made for its shape, and a well-cut diamond will outlast all of them; take it off for the gym, the garden and any work with tools or ropes, and have the prongs checked when the ring is cleaned.

Torn between two rounds the grades cannot separate, or between an Excellent round and an oval with no cut grade at all? Book a design consultation.

Frequently asked questions

What is a diamond cut grade?

A laboratory's single grade for how well a round brilliant was cut. GIA grades standard round brilliants Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair or Poor, weighing brightness, fire, scintillation, weight ratio, durability, polish and symmetry; IGI adds Ideal above Excellent. The grade is about craftsmanship and proportions, not shape, and it decides how much of the light entering the stone comes back to your eye.

What is the difference between diamond cut and diamond shape?

Shape is the outline seen from above: round, oval, cushion, emerald, radiant, pear, marquise, moval. Cut is the quality of the work, the proportions, the facet placement and the finish, which a laboratory grades on a round. Princess cut and cushion cut are shapes with the word cut attached, so when people ask which cut looks biggest or costs least, they mean shape.

Is an Ideal cut better than an Excellent cut?

They are the same top band under two names. GIA's scale stops at Excellent and has no Ideal; IGI calls its top round grade Ideal, with Excellent below it; AGS called it 0. In Clairamor's picker on October 12, 2026 an Ideal round cost at most $54 more than an Excellent from 1 to 3 carats, and less at 2 and 3, so buy on the video and the measurements.

What is the best cut grade for a diamond?

Excellent on a GIA report, Ideal on an IGI report, 0 on the AGS scale. GIA says a round with an Excellent cut should look bright, lively and well proportioned, and that most round brilliants on the market today grade Excellent or Very Good. In lab-grown the top grades cost no more than the lower ones, so there is no reason to buy below Excellent.

Is a Very Good cut diamond good enough?

For a mined diamond on a budget, yes: GIA calls Very Good a great choice at a slightly lower price, and it returns most of its light. In lab-grown it saves nothing: on October 12, 2026 the least expensive Very Good round in Clairamor's picker cost more than the least expensive Excellent at 1, 2, 2.5 and 3 carats, and the Very Good stones ran deeper and measured smaller.

Do oval, cushion and emerald cut diamonds get a cut grade?

Not on a GIA report, which grades cut on the standard round brilliant only and gives fancy shapes polish and symmetry grades. IGI offers a fancy-shape cut grade through a four-step assessment, but the oval, cushion and radiant reports we checked in our picker left the cut grade line blank. Judge a fancy shape by its polish and symmetry, its ratio and depth, and its video.

What are the ideal proportions for a round diamond?

There is no single recipe; GIA's Excellent grade covers many proportion sets. Tolkowsky's 1919 model had a 34.5 degree crown, a 40.75 degree pavilion and a 53 percent table; the typical Ideal or Excellent round in Clairamor's picker is 61 to 62 percent deep with a 57 to 59 percent table. Look for 59 to 63 percent depth and a 54 to 60 percent table.

What does triple excellent mean?

A round with Excellent cut, Excellent polish and Excellent symmetry on the same report, written 3EX in the trade; a Japanese laboratory used the phrase first, on a 1994 report. On an IGI report the equivalent is Ideal or Excellent cut with Excellent polish and symmetry, which describes nearly every round in Clairamor's picker: 9,974 of 9,994 rounds between 1 and 3 carats carried Excellent symmetry on October 12, 2026.

What is a hearts and arrows diamond?

A round cut so precisely that a viewer with a colored ring shows eight dark arrows face-up and eight hearts through the pavilion, a pattern first noticed in Japan in the late 1970s. It is a sign of exact symmetry, not a grade, and no laboratory prints it on a report. An Ideal or Excellent cut with Excellent polish and symmetry is as far as the paper goes.

How are diamonds cut?

In six steps: the rough is scanned and planned by software that maps its inclusions and works out the best yield, marked, sawn by laser with under one percent of its weight lost, bruted against diamond grit until the girdle is round, polished facet by facet on a diamond-charged wheel, then inspected and graded. A 1 carat round takes about ten minutes to brute and two hours to polish.

How much more does an Ideal cut diamond cost?

In mined diamonds the top cut grade carries a premium because cutting to the best proportions wastes more rough. In lab-grown it is close to free. On October 12, 2026 the least expensive Ideal round in Clairamor's picker was $656 at 1 carat against $651 for an Excellent, $1,199 against $1,204 at 2 carats and $1,894 against $1,909 at 3 carats; the widest gap at any weight was $54.

Which cut grades does Clairamor sell?

Ideal, Excellent and Very Good on rounds, nothing below; every stone is lab-grown, D to G, IF to VS2, and listed with its measurements, its IGI, GIA or HRD report and a video. Of the 9,994 rounds between 1 and 3 carats in the picker on October 12, 2026, 24 percent were Ideal, 71 percent Excellent and 5 percent Very Good. Settings start at $950, without the stone.

Related reading

• Round brilliant engagement rings: cut grade, sizes, settings and prices
• Diamond certification: GIA vs IGI, and how to read a report
• Diamond clarity chart: all 11 grades from Flawless to I3, what you can see and what each costs
• Diamond color scale: D to Z chart, what you can see and what each grade costs
• Diamond carat size chart: 0.5 to 5 carats in millimeters, on the hand and in lab-grown prices
• Lab-grown vs natural diamonds: what is the same, what is different and what each costs in 2026
• The 4Cs of diamond quality
• Elongated engagement rings: oval vs emerald vs radiant vs marquise vs moval
• Oval engagement rings: ratios, the bow-tie, settings, sizes and prices
• Cushion cut engagement rings: square vs elongated, sparkle, settings, sizes and prices
• Emerald cut engagement rings: clarity, ratio, settings, sizes and prices
• Which diamond shape looks the biggest?
• Solitaire engagement rings: the complete guide to prongs, heights, shapes and prices
• How are lab-grown diamonds made?
• Diamond price calculator
• Lab-grown diamond prices in 2026: what a lab-grown diamond costs by carat, shape, color, clarity and cut
• Do lab-grown diamonds last? Durability, cloudiness, fading and how they age