On Stones

A note from Catherine on diamonds, certification, and what goes into our pieces — and what doesn’t.

If it tests as a diamond, it’s a diamond.

I source stones I can stand behind, evaluate them in person, and trust my own eye over a piece of paper. Some of the diamonds in this house arrive already certified — IGI or GIA, depending on the supplier. Some arrive uncertified. Both are priced the same way: by what the stone is, not by whether it came with paperwork.

That isn’t the industry default, and it’s the part most worth saying out loud. In most fine jewelry, a certified stone costs more than an equivalent uncertified one, even when nothing about the stone itself is different. The paper has become a price input. I don’t price that way. A diamond is a diamond whether or not a third party graded it on a Tuesday afternoon.

On certification — what it is and what it isn’t.

Stones come to me from cutters and suppliers who each handle certification differently. Some certify everything before it leaves their hands; some don’t. When I buy an uncertified stone, it’s because the stone earned it — the color, the cut, the way it catches light. A missing certificate tells you nothing about the diamond. It tells you something about the supplier’s process, and that’s all.

I don’t send stones out for certification myself. What I offer instead is my own evaluation of every gem that goes into a piece — and if a client needs certification before buying, I honor it and source a certified stone for that commission. The paper exists when it needs to. Most of the time it isn’t the point.

Where the certification habit came from.

The industry’s reflex toward certification didn’t grow up to serve the wearer. It grew up to serve the gift. For most of the category’s modern history, fine jewelry was bought by men for women, and a grade was how you reassured the buyer that he hadn’t been taken advantage of.

That logic still works for a gift. It works less well for a woman buying a piece for herself, who cares less about defending the receipt and more about whether she loves the diamond.

What the freckles are.

A diamond isn’t a perfect object. Most natural diamonds, and many lab-grown ones, contain inclusions — small internal features formed when the stone did. The industry calls these flaws. I call them freckles. They’re where the light catches differently, and they’re part of what makes a diamond yours and not someone else’s.

The mainstream has spent decades training customers to want stones as inclusion-free as possible, partly because cleaner stones grade higher on paper. The result is a generation of diamonds that all look slightly the same, and freckled stones with real character pushed down the price ladder — even when the freckle is the most interesting thing about the stone.

I keep them. When a stone has a freckle that catches the light, I set it where the light will find it.

On lab and natural, treated equally.

I work with both lab-grown and natural diamonds, and I don’t rank them. A lab diamond is chemically, optically, and structurally identical to a natural one — the difference is provenance, not material. For some customers provenance matters; for many it doesn’t. If you prefer natural, I source natural. If you prefer lab — for the price, for the ethics, for any reason or none — I source lab, and I don’t treat it as a compromise. The stone is the stone.

What this means for you.

A Catherine Peck piece is a stone I’ve personally evaluated, set in a piece I’ve personally designed. Whether it arrived with paper is incidental to what it is. If you need certification, say so, and you’ll have it.

What you’re really buying is the stone, and the years you’ll spend with it.

— Catherine