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By Kathryn Shattuck RESPONSIBLE PARTY  FORGET
for a moment the four C's: carat, clarity, color and cut. To the untrained
eye, a diamond's beauty is most often judged by its brilliance."When you buy a diamond, you want people to notice that, wow, it's sparkling," said Randall Wagner, the president and chief executive of GemEx Systems in Mequon, Wis., who with his partner, Kurt Schoeckert, the company's vice president, developed a machine to rate this previously unmeasurable attribute. Scientifically speaking, the machine, a BrillianceScope Analyzer, is an imaging spectrophotometer that scans stones. The analyzer shoots light through a diamond from five angles and measures how much of that light is returned to the eye. Randall Wagner of GemEx Systems helped develop a machine that rates diamonds. In less than a minute, the analyzer produces a document with bar graphs to rate the diamond's brilliance against others. Since its introduction in 1998, the analyzer has measured more than 50,000 diamonds. A scale rates stones in three categories: return of white light, or brilliance; return of colored light, or fire; and scintillation, or twinkle. Because the cut of a diamond - solitaire, emerald, marquise - influences the amount of light reflected in it, the ratings compare diamonds only with others of the same cut. Last year, GemEx began selling its light-analysis reports to retailers, wholesalers and diamond manufacturers. Retailers, including the Sterling Group and Zale's, for example, buy the reports at $30 to $40 apiece, depending on the stone's carat weight. More light translates into an increase in retail value, sometimes by almost 40 percent, Mr. Wagner said. "We are not really grading the diamond for which is better," he said. "Color and clarity define how rare the material is." And don't forget the size. Kathryn Shattuck 
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