By John Boom
Faceting is a long process and to achieve a high quality finished stone requires your best choice of rough gem material to start with.
Most rough faceting material is crystalline based and can have natural cleavages, irregular formations in colors, crazes, cracks and other impurities which could all lead to a poor quality finished gemstone if not picked up before working on it.
It can take many hours to complete a good stone and to do all that work and end up with a gem that has a poor quality finish just isn’t worth all that effort.
So some basic investigations must take place on the selected material.
There are many things to look out for but the most obvious is clear seen cracks and cleavages in the stone to start with. If you can see these you wouldn’t use that piece to start with. Use an eyeglass to magnify each piece to inspect it properly.
Next look at the uniformity of the color.
With stones like say Amethyst, Smoky Quartz, Citrine and basically all the quartz type gems its very common to have a variation of color throughout each piece.
The same can be said for say sapphires.
This can obviously be a good thing to an extent because it can add character to the finished gem. But you need to decide if this is the case or not. Say having purple on one end of a stone and clear on the other side may not be so nice looking and it would be a waste of time pursuing the cutting of that gem for instance. That’s a choice you’ll need to make.
Sometimes investigating the quality of a gem is difficult due the shape and type of material being used. So I advise doing the initial perform on the piece first so you can then evaluate if the gem will be suitable or not. Make sure you try and do performing in the natural grain type way to suit the crystal structure of the gem being used.
Try not to get in the habit of thinking bigger is better and facet gems with most obvious impurities thinking you’ll say have a more valuable finished gem.
This wouldn’t be the case. You’re better to have a slightly smaller better quality gem rather than have a huge damage gem.
No matter how hard we look and investigate each gem it’s not uncommon to find damages within many finished gems and this is the risk and curse of each gem cutters finished stone. Each cutter usually strives to get a most perfect gem with an eye clean quality.
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