The best place in the world to cut a coloured stone.

Why here

Jaipur has been cutting and setting coloured stones for roughly three hundred years. More coloured gemstone rough passes through this city than anywhere else on earth. That is often explained as a cost advantage, which misses the point entirely.

The advantage is judgement.

Consider a piece of labradorite rough. It is grey. It gives away almost nothing about where the flash sits inside it or which direction that flash will face once polished. A cutter has to look at that grey block and decide how to orient it, because the same stone cut two different ways can be worth completely different amounts. Orient it correctly and the labradorescence appears face-up, filling the dome. Orient it wrongly and the flash sits edge-on, visible only from the side, and you have a grey stone.

That judgement takes years to build and cannot be added to a supply chain later. It is the reason Drishtal is in Jaipur and not somewhere with better marketing.

How a cabochon is made

Almost everything we sell is a cabochon: a smooth polished dome rather than a faceted cut. This is a requirement, not a style preference. In moonstone, labradorite and tiger eye the optical effect happens at a specific depth inside the material, and faceting would cut straight through it. A dome lets light sweep across the whole surface.

The sequence:

1. Orienting. The cutter examines the rough, wets it to preview how it will look polished, and decides the plane of the cut. This is the decision that determines the value of the finished stone.
2. Slabbing. The rough is cut into slices on a diamond saw, on the plane chosen in step one.
3. Marking and trimming. The outline of the stone is drawn on the slab and trimmed out.
4. Doming. The top is ground into a curve against progressively finer wheels. The height of the dome is a real decision: too flat and a moonstone's flash spreads thin, too high and it concentrates into a narrow band.
5. Sanding and polishing. Successively finer abrasives, then a final polish. In black onyx this final stage is effectively the entire stone, because the material is opaque and the polish is all you see.

Setting it

Our settings are almost all bezels: a rim of silver formed around the stone and burnished over its edge to hold it. A bezel is harder to execute well than a claw setting, because the rim has to be cut to the exact profile of a stone that is not a regular shape, and any gap between metal and stone is visible from every angle.

The trade-off is worth it. A bezel sits low, catches on nothing, protects the girdle of a soft stone, and has no prongs to loosen. For a 6-hardness stone on a ring worn daily, it is the correct engineering answer, not just the tidy-looking one.

For transparent faceted stones like amethyst and garnet we use open claws instead, because light needs to enter the back of the stone and come out through the top. A bezel on a faceted amethyst makes it noticeably darker.

Finishing

Every piece is finished in rhodium, a platinum-group metal plated in a very thin layer over the sterling. It is harder than silver, it does not react with sulphur so it slows tarnish considerably, and it is slightly cooler in tone, which suits pale blue and grey stones.

It also wears, on a daily-wear ring, after one to three years. We say so on every relevant page rather than in small type.

The people

[NAME THE CUTTERS AND SETTERS WHO MAKE THE PIECES, WITH THEIR PERMISSION]

This is the largest gap on this website, and it is the most valuable thing we could fill. "Handcrafted in Jaipur" with nobody attached to it is a claim. Photographs of a specific bench and the name of the person at it is a fact, and it is worth more than any badge we could put in a footer.

What we do not do

We do not cast in bulk overseas and set stones later. We do not use synthetic stones and describe them ambiguously. We do not claim certifications we do not hold, which is why several details on this site are still in brackets rather than filled in with something plausible.

When those brackets are replaced, they will be replaced with things we can document.