Fire opal, 0.335 carats, Princess Trilliant by A. Collins

This tiny beauty has quite a few mistakes in it, if you look past the pretty sparkles.

As soon as I started cutting the crown, the thing flew off my dop and clear across the room! The landing caused some minor chips on the pavilion, one of which is extremely obvious in the video.

I did my best trying to realign the thing but it took several attempts, and even with my best effort it was not quite right. My girdle is not level, and several of my meet points don’t actually meet.

I wanted to share this one so any other newbs or aspiring faceters don’t feel intimidated by all of our beautiful cuts - we make mistakes too! Sometimes many of them all at once, and we spend hours coming up with as many curse words as we can think of while we’re trying to fix them! But even this dumpster fire turned out rather pretty, all things considered. :)

And when I say this thing is tiny, I really mean it. American penny for scale: tiny orange triangle about three times the height of a penny

  • Crylos@lemmy.worldM
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    11 months ago

    If the deal seems too good to be true for a stone, it likely is. There are many many many tricks used to hide quality issues such as:

    • setting stone with a metalic backing - can provide better light return and make it harder to tell if the stone is windowed
    • filed rubies
    • oiled emeralds

    I have sold stones to friends and co-workers and always price them lower than market as I am not a professional. I will also refund them if they take it to a gemologist who disagrees with my price. But as the poster has indicated the stone that was cut had numerous flaws in the cutting process and is pretty but not worth much.

    Still great to look at!!!