Fancy Grade
Read the Fancy Grade of a result card with its digit, the Grade Probability line, the Color Distribution bar and the Color Name.
The fancy rows of a card describe the color of the diamond on the fancy color scale. Read them when the verdict is Confident Fancy Color or Borderline. See Verdict and D–Z Grade.
Fancy Grade
The Fancy Grade row shows a zone and a digit after a dot, such as Light.4 or Intense.1.
The fancy grader returns one of eight zones. Six of them are grades: Light, Fancy, Intense, Vivid, Dark and Deep. The map also has two more zones, Dull and Colorless, which say the diamond is not fancy.
| Zone | Grade |
|---|---|
light |
Fancy Light |
fancy |
Fancy |
intense |
Fancy Intense |
vivid |
Fancy Vivid |
dark |
Fancy Dark |
deep |
Fancy Deep |
dull |
not a fancy diamond |
colorless |
not a fancy diamond |
light is the GIA Fancy Light, not the GIA Light. The full GIA vocabulary runs Faint, Very
Light, Light, Fancy Light, Fancy, Fancy Intense, Fancy Vivid, Fancy Dark, Fancy Deep. Cutwise
reports the grades from Fancy Light on. For a yellow diamond, GIA does not use Faint, Very Light
or Light, because that range is K to Z on the D–Z scale.
The grader is a classifier, not a table of thresholds. Each zone is a region of the Munsell color map, so look at the color map of the card to see where the diamond sits.
When 95% or more of the diamond reads as colorless, the card shows no fancy grade. The card then has no color map either.
The digit after the zone
The digit is a Cutwise subgrade for the strength of the color inside its zone, from 1 to 5. Cutwise divides each zone into five subgrades of equal width. 1 is the weak end of the zone and 5 is its strong end. This subgrade is separate from the FCRF subgrades.
The zones Light, Fancy, Intense and Vivid follow each other on one scale. On this scale, the strong end of a zone borders the next zone, and the weak end borders the previous one:
| Card shows | Reads as |
|---|---|
| Light.4 | Fancy Light close to its strong end |
| Light.5 | Fancy Light at its strong end, next to Fancy |
| Intense.1 | Fancy Intense at its weak end, next to Fancy |
| Intense.5 | Fancy Intense at its strong end, next to Fancy Vivid |
Dark and Deep are not on this scale. Their digit places the diamond inside the zone only.
Within one zone, a higher digit is a stronger color. Fancy.4 is stronger than Fancy.2.
Grade Probability
The grader also returns the probability of each zone. The Grade Probability row shows them as a line:
| Line | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Fancy 100.0% | the grader puts all the probability on one zone |
| Light 95.0% Dull 5.0% | almost all the probability is on Light, the rest on Dull |
| Intense 54.0% Fancy 46.0% | the probability is close to a split between two zones |
The line starts with the estimated zone, the zone of the Fancy Grade, even when another zone is more likely. A second zone joins it only when the two together reach 90%. Use the line to judge how certain the grade is: Fancy 100.0% and a split between two zones are different situations for a price.
Color Distribution
Under the line, a bar labelled Color Distribution shows how the color of the diamond spreads over the zones. On a card, the zones run in the order Colorless, Dark, Dull, Light, Fancy, Deep, Intense, Vivid. A zone with a share shows its percentage under the bar, such as Fancy 75%.
A bracket above the bar marks the range the grade can take, and a triangle marks where the grade falls in it. The bracket is labelled with the Fancy Grade. The triangle follows the digit of the grade: on the secondary round, Fancy.1 sits near the weak end of the Fancy zone, and on the primary round, Fancy.3 sits in its middle.
The probability line and the bar come from two separate outputs of the grader, so they can differ. On the secondary round, the line reads Fancy 80.0% Light 20.0% while the bar shows Dull 1%, Light 24% and Fancy 75%. The bar shows shares of color, not probabilities.
Color Name
The Color Name row gives a general color name from the ISCC-NBS system, such as Pale Yellow, Light Yellow or Light Greenish Yellow. It is not the color description on a lab report.
Cutwise looks the name up from the Munsell color of the diamond, independently of the grade. So a card estimated at Light.1 can read Yellowish Gray. When the color has no name in the system, the row is hidden.