Using The Carat Standard
By using the site, you agree to these Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, please do not use the service. If you use it for another person or organization, you confirm that you have authority to do so.
Education, not an appraisal
The site interprets information visible in grading reports and offers general education. It is not a gemological examination, appraisal, laboratory grade, authentication, valuation, or recommendation to buy or sell.
A report cannot establish beauty, identity, condition, provenance, or value on its own. Confirm important details with the issuing laboratory and, when the decision warrants it, an independent qualified professional.
Report readings and profiles
Grading reports are opinions of their issuing laboratories. The Carat Standard is independent of those laboratories unless a page expressly says otherwise.
A Carat Standard score, category, or profile is a consistent educational reading of report-visible characteristics—not a new grade or a promise of appearance or performance. Transcription and explanations can be incomplete or wrong, so compare every field with the original report.
What you submit
Only submit a report, link, or question that you have the right to provide. You keep ownership of your material and give us the limited permission needed to transmit it (including to service providers that process it on our behalf), read, format, store extracted report facts, answer your request, secure the service, and improve it as described in the Privacy Policy.
Do not submit confidential, sensitive, unlawful, or unnecessary personal information.
Fair use
Use the site lawfully and do not:
- interfere with the service, bypass limits or security, or attempt unauthorized access;
- submit malware, deceptive material, or content that violates another person’s rights;
- present a Carat Standard reading as a laboratory grade, appraisal, professional opinion, or guarantee.
We may restrict access when reasonably necessary to protect the service, its users, or others.
Acceptable use and automated access
You are welcome to view and share individual pages, link to them, and quote brief portions with attribution and a link back to the page.
Without our written permission, you may not:
- use scrapers, bots, or other automated means to copy, harvest, or bulk-download Carat Standard scores, analyses, rankings, or The Collection’s data. Search engines and answer-engine crawlers that honor our robots.txt are permitted;
- systematically query our API or site features, or use their outputs to reverse-engineer or attempt to replicate the scoring methodology; or
- republish scores or analyses in bulk, or add them to a competing database, product, or dataset.
The facts on a diamond grading report belong to the issuing laboratory and can be verified directly with it. The Carat Standard’s scores, analyses, text, and curation of The Collection are our own work.
We may block, rate-limit, or otherwise restrict automated traffic.
Our work and third-party services
Our original writing, design, graphics, scoring presentation, software, and branding belong to The Carat Standard or its licensors. You may link to public pages and quote brief portions with attribution, but may not republish substantial portions or imply our endorsement.
Laboratory names, reports, retailer names, and other third-party material belong to their respective owners. Links to outside services are provided for convenience and do not guarantee their availability, accuracy, or endorsement.
Availability and changes
The service may change, pause, or end. Supported laboratories, features, scoring methods, and content may also change. We do not promise continuous access or that every report can be found or read.
Disclaimers and liability
To the fullest extent permitted by law, the service is provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of accuracy, completeness, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, or uninterrupted availability.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, The Carat Standard will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages; lost profits or data; or losses arising from a purchase, sale, appraisal, insurance decision, reliance on site output, or inability to use the service. Rights that cannot legally be excluded remain unaffected.
Updates and contact
We may update these terms as the service develops. The effective date will change when we do. Questions may be sent to hello@thecaratstandard.com.