A small bench, a good light, and a lot of patience.

Faceting began the way most of these things begin — with one person, one second-hand machine, and a shoebox of rough that turned out to be mostly disappointing.

The disappointing shoebox is the important part. Buying gem rough sight-unseen is a mug’s game, and the trade has never been in a great hurry to fix it. Photographs are lit to flatter, weights are optimistic, and “slightly included” covers a multitude of sins. We started selling because we thought it could be done straightforwardly instead.

Rough here is photographed as it actually is, described by someone who has looked at it under a loupe, and sold once. If a stone has a veil running through the middle, we will tell you where it is and how we would plan around it. If we would not cut it ourselves, we do not list it.

The gemmology

The thing that makes this work is unglamorous: we have a qualified gemmologist in-house, and stones go across their desk before they reach the website.

That matters more in rough than most people expect. Synthetics turn up in parcels. So does glass, and so do dyed and fracture-filled stones that are perfectly obvious once cut and far from obvious beforehand. A species can be mislabelled all the way down a supply chain without anybody meaning any harm by it. We would rather find that at our end than yours.

So: species confirmed, treatments identified and stated in the listing, and anything we cannot stand behind goes back where it came from. If a stone is treated, it says so. If we are not certain of a stated origin, we say that too.

The tools

We do not pretend to be toolmakers. We are cutters who got tired of buying rubbish, and what we stock is simply what survived on our own benches.

Dop sticks are a good example. They are not complicated — brass with a knurled band — but the cheap ones are soft, out of round, and faced anything but flat, and a dop that runs out by half a degree will cost you an evening at the transfer stage. The ones we sell are the ones we stopped swearing at.

Everything we sell is something we reach for ourselves. It is not a clever strategy — it just means we notice quickly when something is not good enough.