Craft
Four decisions, in the order they are made
Every stone here went through the same sequence. None of it is proprietary, and describing it plainly is more useful than calling it precision.
01
Reading the rough
A piece of rough hides most of what matters. Colour is usually uneven and often concentrated along one axis; brilliance depends on proportions that do not exist yet; inclusions that are invisible from one direction sit across the table from another.
The first pass is about finding where the colour actually lives and how it will behave once light is travelling through a finished stone rather than a lump. In strongly dichroic material — corundum especially — the same piece can show two noticeably different colours depending on how it is turned.
- Looking for
- Colour distribution, dichroism, inclusion planes, fracture risk
- Decided here
- Orientation, and therefore the shape the stone can become
02
The decision that costs weight
Orientation determines what the finished stone looks like face-up, and it frequently conflicts with the orientation that would preserve the most weight. The two rarely coincide, and when they do it is luck rather than skill.
Choosing colour over weight is not automatically correct. A stone that loses a third of its weight to gain a small improvement in face-up colour may not be worth cutting that way. The judgement is about how much is gained for how much is given up, on this particular piece of material, at this size.
- Trade-off
- Face-up colour and brilliance against retained weight
- Not a rule
- Every stone is decided on its own terms
03
Proportion, and where light goes
Once orientation is fixed, proportion decides how much light returns to the eye. Cut too shallow and light passes through the pavilion and out the back, leaving a window in the middle of the stone. Cut too deep and the stone goes dark at the centre, holding light it never returns.
The correct depth is not a constant. It moves with refractive index, so a spinel and a sapphire of the same shape want different pavilion angles, and it moves again with the tone of the material — darker rough is often cut shallower on purpose, to keep the colour open.
- Too shallow
- Windowing: a pale, transparent centre
- Too deep
- Extinction: a dark, closed centre
- Varies with
- Refractive index, tone, and intended lighting
04
Photographing it honestly
Gemstone photography is where most of the trade quietly overstates itself: a dark background, a hard light, and a saturation adjustment will improve almost any stone on a screen and describe none of them accurately.
Every stone here is photographed at a fixed camera distance against a colourimetrically neutral ground, with a colour reference frame shot at the start of each session. Retouching removes dust and background artefacts. It never touches colour, saturation, clarity, inclusions, or the outline of the stone. Where a stone changes under different light, both frames are published rather than the better one.
- Fixed
- Camera distance, lighting geometry, white balance per session
- Never edited
- Colour, saturation, clarity, inclusions, outline
- Published in pairs
- Daylight and incandescent, where it matters
The point of all of this is that you can see it in the stone.
Look at what is available