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To see a splendid modern example of a connoisseur-class black diamond, look at the picture of the 33.74 carat pear-shaped Star of Amsterdam in Fred Ward's paperback book, Diamonds. Cut by Holland's Max Drukker from a 55.85 carat bort in 1972, this 145-facet stone is jet-black through and through. Ward feels that when you couple the stone's exceptional color with its high polish and uniformly smooth surface, you have "a black diamond as fine as any ever cut. If nothing else, it proves black diamonds can be as awe-inspiringly beautiful as any other diamond."

Jewelers and consumers looking for black diamonds probably won't be able to find stones this lustrous, even-colored, and defect-free. But since most demand for blacks is in melee sizes from .01 to .05 carats, they can expect decent stones with fairly uniform color and minimal clarity problems. Although larger sizes are more, the price difference is not as much as with colorless diamonds. "You might think that the cost difference between 1 carat and melee black diamonds should be the same as for white diamonds," says Ambrish Sethi of Manak Jewels in San Francisco, a specialist in both antique-cut and fancy color diamonds. "But since most of the cost of a black diamond stems from the labor rather than the value of the material, the difference in cost for melee versus caraters is only double while for whites it is ten times. That makes fine black diamonds in larger sizes an impressive bargain."