22k yellow gold and boulder opal bead necklace

About a week ago one of the jewelers I know called me and asked if I could help her out with a customer she was working with. She helps people trying to do a "do it yourself" project with jewelry sometimes (not something I recommend as inexperience in this field rarely leads to fine results but that's another story). So she had a young gent who had managed to design a ring (nothing very original but that's also another story) on a computer using Cad-Cam and had a local casting company cast the piece up in platinum for him. He had purchased three diamonds from an online company whose big thing is that they (supposedly-but that's yet another story) sell ethically sourced stones and jewelry.

The reason they came to me is because somewhere in the design to casting process some little beads had been added in on various parts of the ring that were not a design element and were not supposed to be there. No one knew how they even got on there. They weren't a mistake in the casting process as they were quite regularly placed. Unfortunately they were regularly placed in areas where it was just about impossible to get them cleaned out of. (Again, this is why I don't recommend do it yourself jewelry projects.) He also needed to get the stones set into the four prong settings. I don't believe in four prong settings because if you lose one prong you can lose the stone. If you have six prong settings you have to lose three prongs to lose a stone. But when confronted with a design that only four prongs were going to work on (and this was one of them) I believe you need to make the prongs substantial enough that it is going to take quite a bit to knock one off or wear it down. The prongs on this ring were nowhere near heavy enough, but again, this is why I don't recommend this kind of stuff (have I said that enough yet?). So when no one else can do it, people like to bring it to me. Sweet, huh?

But this isn't really about the ring itself. It's about ideal cut diamonds. So what is an ideal cut diamond?

In 1919 a mathematician diamond cutter named Marcel Tolkowsky worked out a formula on what angles to cut a diamond to that would result in the maximum amount of brilliance, scintillation and fire in a diamond. He figured out how the light would best travel through the stone and be reflected back out at the viewer by the facets below. This involved a series of calculations, including the size of the table (the top flat area on a diamond) relative to the total size of the stone, the crown angle (the angle the top part of the diamond is cut to), the pavilion angle (the angle the bottom part of the diamond is cut to), and the crown and pavilion height percentage. An ideal cut diamond has to have the correct measurements in all of these categories in order to be considered ideal.

Tolkowsky had a cousin named Lazare Kaplan who was also in the diamond business and he went on to cut, promote and sell ideal cut diamonds and he was the first to do that. The company he formed, originally Lazare Kaplan and now Lazare Diamond, has been in the forefront of many of the innovations in the diamond marketplace. They developed the technology to laser inscribe the girdles of diamonds that is so prevalent today among other things.

Now when I started selling Lazare ideal cut diamonds about 25 years ago, hardly any diamonds (less than 1%) were actually being cut to ideal proportions. The primary reason for this was because when cutters cut a stone to ideal proportions they lose more weight from the rough than normal. Most cutters, being paid by weight, just wanted to get the largest stone possible from the rough and since at certain sizes (.50 ct..75 ct. 1 ct. etc.) there were significant price jumps just for hitting that weight, stones were often cut horribly just to hit the desired weight.