A laboratory is only as good as the things it refuses to do.

Ownership and disclosure

IGML exists to answer one question, what is this stone?, for people who were not in the room when it was graded. That answer is only worth something if the laboratory has nothing riding on it.

Our owners hold interests elsewhere in the diamond trade. That is the first question worth asking about any laboratory, and we would rather answer it than wait to be asked. So here is the line, and it does not move:

• IGML issues no report on affiliated goods. Goods in which any owner or employee of the laboratory holds a financial interest are refused at intake, in writing. There is no quiet exception for our own people.
• The laboratory holds no inventory. IGML does not buy, sell, or broker diamonds or jewelry, and takes no consignment positions. Its revenue is grading fees and nothing else.
• What you submit stays here. Submission records, grades, and client identities are confidential to the laboratory and are never shared with any company related to it. Your parcel is not market intelligence.
• No one is paid on volume. No grader's or manager's compensation is tied to any client's business. There is no commercial reason for a grade to move.
• No report states a value. IGML does not appraise, does not publish replacement values, and issues no document that can be used to justify a price.

How you can check us

A policy is worth what its process can prove. Ours:

• Graders work blind. Stones reach the grading bench under custody numbers, not client names. The grader calling color does not know whose goods are on the bench, so no client's standing with the laboratory can reach the grade.
• Every call is reviewed. A second grader independently reviews each grade before a report is issued. Disagreement triggers supervised re-examination, not a coin flip.
• Grades are not negotiable. A client who disputes a grade may request re-examination, performed blind by a grader who did not make the original call. What the re-examination finds is what the report says. There is no other appeals process, for anyone.
• Standards are external. We grade against the internationally accepted 4Cs framework and nomenclature conventions of the international trade, using master stone comparison under standardized lighting, so an IGML grade means the same thing an informed appraiser expects it to mean.
• We publish our concordance. A stated proportion of IGML reports is submitted to a major outside laboratory for blind comparison, and the match rates are published here by quarter. The sampling rule is mechanical and published in advance, by report number, so anyone can check against the registry that the sample was not chosen. Quarters that go badly get published too, or the exercise is worthless.

Testing before grading

No stone is graded on the strength of anyone's word, including clients we know well and trust. Every submission is instrument-tested to confirm diamond identity, and screened to support its stated origin, before grading begins. Stones whose test results do not match their stated identity are stopped, documented, and returned with an explanation. In our view this is the entire point of a laboratory: the paper describes what the instruments and the graders found, not what the parcel label said.

Chain of custody

Clients trust us with goods worth many times our fees. From the moment a parcel is opened, every item is logged, photographed, and assigned a custody number under dual control. Items move through the laboratory stage by stage with each hand-off recorded, are stored in rated safes when not on a bench, and are covered by jewelers block insurance while in our care.

About the laboratory

IGML was founded by professionals from the diamond trade who watched the lab-grown market outgrow the paperwork behind it, and decided the fix was a laboratory with modern instruments, old-fashioned grading discipline, and a registry anyone can check. We serve a deliberately limited roster of retail and manufacturing clients, because turnaround and rigor are both easier to keep when you refuse to be everything to everyone.