The Diamond Estimator Shiny App

People often have expensive jewelry they know little about. Perhaps it was a gift. Perhaps it was an inheritance. Perhaps they just doubt what the store told them.

Knowing more about their jewelry can help them in many ways:

• Were they misled in by a sales person?
• Is this item valuable?
• Should it be especially insured?
• Is it worth bragging about to friends?

The Diamond Estimator can answer these questions.

When most people want to know how “big” a diamond is, what they really want to know is how much it weighs. Diamonds are measured in carats, which is 0.2 grams. To accurately weigh a diamond, you have to put it on a scale by itself. But that's problematic: most people don't have loose diamonds, they have diamonds which are set in a ring, etc.

The Diamond Estimator uses industry standard formulae to estimate the weight of a stone based upon its dimensions. This works because diamond stone cutting follows well established proportions, and so from the dimensions we can estimate the volume. After that, it's a matter of using the specific gravity of diamonds to calculate weight.

Let us suppose you have an oval brilliant cut diamond which is 5 mm by 7 mm. We can calculate the weight in the following fashion:

  wid <- 5
  hi <- 7

  ## Estimate the depth of the stone 
  dep <- ((wid+hi)/2)*0.6

  ## Now, caclulate the weight of the stone
  weight <- ((wid+hi)/2)^2*dep*0.0062

  paste(weight, "carats")

[1] "0.80352 carats"

We anticipate that we can monetize the application in the following ways

• We can sell advertising to jewelers: they have an audience which is clearly interested in fine jewelry
• We can sell advertising to insurance companies: the application could be extended to give back of the envelope price estimates
• We can sell inexpensive calipers using affliate links so people will have the ability to make the measurements.