A State-By-State Breakdown on Diamond Shapes and Sizes

Which state is home to consumers with the biggest and best diamonds (and no, the answer is not Texas)? What’s the popular most diamond shape in Alabama? California? Alaska?

These are some of the questions White Pine aimed to answer with a recently released report on diamond jewelry ownership in the United States. 

Many jewelers already are familiar with White Pine, which has a business-to-business arm called White Pine Trading that buys and sells pre-owned jewelry and diamonds within the trade.

But, through WP Diamonds and WPDiamonds.com, the company also deals directly with thousands of consumers, which gives it access to a wealth of data about what type of jewelry and diamonds people actually own.

Matthew Howe, the company’s vice president of marketing, said White Pine has opted to begin sharing some of that data with the industry, and so it has published this first report, America’s Diamond and Jewelry Ranking. 

The report is based on 15,000 consumer inquiries and interactions but, Howe pointed out, it is not a ranking of what’s selling at retail right now. It’s an ownership study, looking at what people already have and where they live.

There’s much to examine in the report and I had a hard time deciding where to begin but, in the interest of getting out of the office before 7 p.m. for once, I decided to go with diamond shape.

What the report shows about the most popular diamond shapes in the U.S. is not unexpected in the least, with round and princess-cut diamonds comprising the majority of the market.

What Howe said he did find surprising was that cushion-, emerald- and marquise-cut diamonds were all in the same ballpark in terms of ownership. A total of 4.8 percent of consumers included in the study owned a marquise, while 4.47 percent owned an emerald-cut diamond and 4.12 percent had a cushion; they were the three most commonly owned cuts after rounds and princesses.

The White Report also noted that since the launch of WPDiamonds.com in 2012, oval-shaped diamonds, which, as I understand it, are gaining ground in the market along with marquises and pears, have increased in popularity. They’ve gone from being the eighth most popular diamond cut in the country to the sixth in that three-year span. (And both ovals and pears are apparently very popular in Texas.)

From shape, we can move on to