A friend of mine recently approached me about procuring a
rough diamond; uncut, untreated, raw from the earth. I was pretty excited at the prospect of
handling a new, fresh idea versus the literal hundreds of halo engagement rings
I have had the pleasure to build over and over again throughout my career. As much as I love diamonds, and always will,
I must say I am getting pretty jaded to the current design market. Commercial jewelry stores filled with trays
upon trays of the same idea.
So obviously when my friend came to me with a nontraditional
idea, I jumped at the opportunity to lend a hand. She initially started sending me Etsy links,
which I wholeheartedly admit I cringed.
Etsy can be a wonderful place for design, it brings the internet to the
ordinary craftsman and broadens choices for consumers, but it also can be dangerous
in the sense you do not know what you are buying. There is no safety net, and I could tell from
some of the pictures I was seeing, the stones depicted and being called
diamonds were most likely Herkimers.
“Herkimer Diamonds are quartz that have grown non-traditionally in that typically their hexagonal shape terminates to a point only at one end
of the stone, but in Herkimers, the hexagonal point is echoed also on its
opposing side. This growth causes the
quartz to have two points on either end due to the fact the mineral did not
grow in close contact with a host rock (http://geology.com/articles/herkimer-diamonds.shtml)”.
So after telling my friend that we should try to find a stone
in person, I began educating myself on raw diamond characteristics.
I know that diamonds
naturally can grow in a cube, octahedron (8 sided), or a dodecahedron (12
sided) because of how neat its crystalline structure is atomically composed
from Carbon. My DCA background then took me right to the 4 C’s and also has
taught me that a third of a diamond’s price is the way it’s cut. We already know we are taking the cut out of
the equation which will dramatically cut the price. So what we have left is color, carat, and
clarity.
Carat is the weight of the stone, to which my friend had not
particular preference, so that was not a hindrance. “So I looked into color and
clarity, from my research I found that raw diamonds are typically not very
white/clear, they are usually tinted gray or yellowish colors since the gem
quality diamonds are usually cut for retail product. That helped knowing that I am not looking for
a crystal clear stone. Also I could look for how the surface was formed, like
fingerprints. It could be grooved with
growth lines, a frosted or waterworn surface due to water erosion (like sea glass),
or it could be Mirrored or glass-like. This knowledge helped but I truly needed
to know the difference that would make telling diamonds apart from another
stone much easier. That characteristic is a Trigon, tiny triangles that can be
thought of as a diamond’s stretch mark (https://www.cigem.ca/ross/rough.html).”
Armed with new found diamond knowledge, I embarked to the New
York/New Jersey Gem and Mineral Show in hopes to find an acceptable diamond
specimen. We found a plethora of
Herkimer stones but the search was seemingly growing bleaker by the hour when
it seemed no diamonds were in attendance this year, until finally we found a
booth that knew of a California based company that specifically sold precious
gemstones. There we fortunately found a
few rough diamonds to excitedly choose from and had to decide what was more
important; size, shape, or color. We
ended up finding a beautifully perfectly shaped octahedron that was very white
in color with visible Trigons.
Sources:
Diamond Photos/Information source: https://www.cigem.ca/ross/rough.html
Herkimer Photo/Information source: http://geology.com/articles/herkimer-diamonds.shtml
