Carat, karat, carrot!? Part 2

As mentioned last week, if you’re here, you’re quite likely doing research on your engagement ring. You know which metal suits your skin best and so the big question of the size of the little rock comes next.

As a continuation of giving you more background info on your purchase, here’s a quick question – even if you know you want a half carat or full carat diamond in your engagement ring, how much does that weigh? And what if you’ve found that your budget allows for an odd size given in ‘points’, what’s all that? Here goes:

– there are 100 points in a carat ie. 50 points is half a carat and expressed as 0.50

– in metric terms, 1 carat equals 200 milligrams or 0.2 gram. (your average medium size Cadbury’s chocolate bar is 100 grams…just to put a bit of daily life perspective on things!)

– the term carat was originally used for measuring both metals and gems in the Middle Ages. This then changed. Don’t confuse this gem weighing term with ‘karat’ ( but confusingly often interchanged with the word carat), which measures the purity of gold with this weight.

– the most common explanation for why this structure for measuring still exists today relates to how reliably the seed of the carob tree could be used in ancient times for weighing. Apparently they were and are so uniform that they could be used universally. Hence both metals and gems were given a value according to how many carob seeds they weighed. This stuck.

Right, back to your research on your engagement ring, diamond pendant or whatever other lovely you’re after today.

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