Currently, my main activity is cutting and selecting best quality natural gemstones for jewelry. I list my gemstones available for purchase in the section GEMSTONES of this website, click here to see them!
I’m also publishing my new stones on my Instagram. Click here and follow it if you want to see what’s new, even before they are uploaded to this site! If you like some of my stones, or want to order something different, please contact me!
The process or faceting of a custom cut gem has several steps, explained below.
- Selecting of gemstone rough
This step requires a lot of gemological knowledge and also faceting experience. High quality gem rough is very expensive and any mistake can derive in serious economic losses. Many decisions have to be made on this stage, to decide the best orientation of the future gem inside the crystal, and to estimate its expected weight, color and clarity.
- Choosing or creation of the faceting design
It is a very creative process, were we choose the general shape of the future gem, the style of cutting (step cut, brilliant, mixed, etc) and the distribution of individual facets. There are many published designs for precision cutting available online, but new designs can also be created with special computer programs, such as GemCad and Gem Cut Studio.
Faceting designs can be easily exported as DXF or STL files and used in jewelry CAD programs, to create an appropriate mounting around the stone.
- Light return optimization
This is probably the main difference between commercial cutting, done mostly to save maximum weight of the stones, and precision cutting, were sometimes we have to loose some more weight to be able to produce a gem with correct symmetry and proportions that will provide maximum brilliance and beauty.
Fortunately, nowadays, special computer programs can be used to see the future gem on the screen and adjust the angles of the cut for the maximum light return. So the faceter doesn’t need to make test-cut stones for the new design, we can just modify the angles and other parameters on a computer screen and observe how the stone changes, searching for the optimum proportions.
- Faceting process
Now we are ready to cut the stone! Precision faceting process is much slower than the commercial cutting. A worker at a cutting factory can produce dozens of stones a day, while precision cutting requires hours and sometimes even days of work for each stone. But the result is really worth it!
The stone is first glued to a brass stick called dop, which is introduced in a precision faceting machine, operated manually to adjust the exact position for cutting and polishing of each facet.
Special attention is given to the symmetry of facets and to their meet-points, and also to the polish quality of each facet. Sophisticated alloys and ceramic polishing laps, used with oxide or diamond polishers, make it possible to get flat facets with a perfect polish on different types of gems.
Click here to see some pictures of a real faceting process in this post in my blog!