CSGemstones

Gem cutting is not always only joy and fun as this unheated tanzanite shows. After preforming a small fracture showed up which I had to remove. Then, out of nothing a huge crack almost parallel to the table 🤯. Can it be rescued? Stay tuned - new plan is cutting crown first.

I can‘t stop playing around with tanzanites. What you see here is called pleochroism: the mineral has different colors along the different crystallographic axes, made visible by rotating in in front of a computer screen (polarized light source). Typical colors are blue, violet, yellow, but also pink, green and colorless is possible. No other mineral displays this phenomenon so well pronounced and this, among other things, makes tanzanite (or zoisite as the mineral species is called) one of my all time favorites.

Cutting small stones is sometimes even more demanding than large stones, especially if the material is rather soft. I had to cut a moonstone (from Ziller valley, Tyrol) for a client´s ring in a full brilliant cut with perfect meet points: 2.9 mm or 0.075 ct. Looking forward to cutting some larger stuff again ;-)

This Burmese ruby came in for a recut. Scratches, a dull surface, completely asymmetrical and a huge ding in the pavilion. Weighing in at 2.26 ct the customer wanted the gem to stay above 2 ct, thus a complete recut was impossible. So lowering the girdle, making the shape a bit more symmetrical, and cutting a steeper, well polished crown to hide the ding on the back. Job done with 2.1 ct remaining ;-)

Fun with luminescence. My colleague Anna () and I were giving a talk on luminescence and how we use it in our research, e.g. to identify natural diamonds, during the at the

Finished some sapphires for a customer. 2 had to be a perfect match for earrings, thus I split the elongated rough into two parts. The other stone is for a pendant. Starting from 5.6 and 5.4 ct the stones ended up at 4 ctw, the large one slightly above 2 ct. Rough was sources from our friends at - always a good place to find exception rough.

Sometimes a piece of jewelry comes in with the task to identify the gemstone(s), in this case if it is an aquamarine. Silver, the age and the clarity are suspicious and a final proof is obtained by using UV light. The red fluorescence identifies the center stone as synthetic spinel - no further analysis needed.

Ready for another day at the with
All cases restocked, lets see how Long it lasts

If you are in Munich and want to get out of the snow- visit the , where Truthseeker Gems and CSGemstones join forces to provide you the best gemstones - C1.246

I did a gemcutting demonstration at the booth this year. Despite the rough setup and bad light I was able to cut a nice tourmaline trillion. Faceting is so much fun - everyone should try at least once!