Gemstone Recutting & Repolishing

Cut & Re-polish Your Gemstones in Malaysia – Faceting The Magical Process

Are you looking to reshape your gemstones to make it look smaller, smoother and more refined? If so, then we can help you with that.

Our expert jewellers can cut and re-polish your gemstones or jewellery in Malaysia to turn it into almost any shape or look that you desire. And you get to look beautiful and wear it for any occasion, especially the grand and important ones.

But that’s not all. Your gemstone will also have a shiny and glittering effect in the sun or light, because of our jeweller’s craftsmanship.

Many of our jewellers are trained for many years to cut and re-polish different types of gemstones and jewellery in Malaysia, so that when you wear it, it makes you look elegant, beautiful, gorgeous and stunning altogether.

If you want to make the cutting of your necklace, bracelet or ring different from your friends, we can also help you with that. Our team can suggest creative and unique ideas to make your gemstone cutting stand out from the normal and ordinary ones, so you will feel special and look stunning when wearing it. This article explores the wondrous and highly skilled process that turns a rare rough gemstone crystal into a work of art.

The Best Polished Gemstones & Jewellery in Malaysia

Here’s how our cutting and re-polishing process works at Fa’iq Jewels.

The Rough

The whole process begins with the rough crystal. Crystals come in many different shapes and forms. Some are still in their “crystal habit” (the natural form in which a particular gem mineral develops) others have been broken by the mining process or by nature itself with the twisting of the rock in which it formed. Others still, are alluvial and carry the appearance of water worn pebbles.

Less rare gems, produced in quantity and smaller sizes are often cut as calibrations – standard sizes. In the case of these cuts, the principal consideration is a uniform size – an 8 x 6 oval for example. However, with fine, rare gemstones, the shape of the rough generally dictates the eventual shape of the finished piece, rather than any allusion to a standard size. This is because fine gemstones are very rare and expensive and a cutter will try to maximize the yield he gains from a piece of rough in order to minimize loss of weight – weight is money.

Hence, a short stubby crystal may lend itself best to a round cut whilst a long tourmaline pencil would almost certainly be cut as an emerald cut as this would be the shape that incurs the least loss. Balancing the need to maintain weight and the importance of good proportions to create good light return is the cutter’s eternal challenge. Stones which are cut purely to maintain weight and do not take into consideration symmetry, beauty and brilliance are not considered to be top grade – and a bad cut can ruin a very good piece of rough.

The process of cutting fine rough into a scintillating finished gemstone is called faceting. This is a very skilled process where a cutter places a number of carefully placed facets (or faces) onto the table and pavilion of a gemstone. The steps taken to achieve this are considered below. 

Planning the Cut

This is a very important step. The cutter will consider the shape of the rough and the inclusions within it. Once he has determined the “lie of the land” he must decide how he will orient the cut – where the table will sit and where the pavilion will be. Many things are taken into consideration here – any bad inclusions must be removed, colour banding and zoning, if present,  will affect the orientation of the table as will the actual shape of the piece.

Once the cutter has examined the piece thoroughly he will begin to clean the stone up. If a piece requires slicing it will be done with a special machine. Otherwise included areas are ground off with a special lap.

Pre shaping & Dopping

Next comes pre shaping – this is a skilled art. It is done “freehand” – the cutter holds the rough stone in his hand and grinds it using a spinning wheel called a “lap” primed with diamond powder. This will produce the very basic shape of the cut.

The pre shaped piece of rough is now attached to a special metal rod called a dop. Special dopping wax is used to do this. The dopped rod is then connected to a handheld faceter.

Faceting

This is where the real magic is performed. Hundreds of tiny faces or “facets” are placed on the table and pavilion of the pre shaped rough. This is an incredibly skilled and specialized talent which takes many years to perfect – experienced master cutters are a cherished breed.

The grinding lap is removed from the machine and a faceting lap is now used which is a much finer lap primed with very fine diamond powder. The facets are placed on the stone at extremely precise angles. The timing and skill involved here are incredible.

Using the hand held faceter, the cutter uses the Height, Angle, Index triangle to place each individual facet separately on the crown and pavilion. Height will control the depth to which each facet is cut, angle controls the plane on which the facets are cut and the index controls the placement of facets around the shape.  

The crown and pavilion are essentially cut to form a lens and reflector. They gather and focus the light, then reflect it back at the eye. The crown facets form the lens, gathering the light from all directions and focusing it on the pavilion which becomes the reflector, bouncing light around inside the stone and then back upwards via the crown and out to the eye.

However, the same angles are not used for every gemstone. Different minerals have different requirements and a cutter must be aware of these. This is because different gems have different critical angles. To explain – the angles used for each facet denote the final result achieved, in that they affect the brilliance and reflection a gemstone is capable of. Each facet’s angles must be adjusted to maximize its optical performance.

The angles used will vary based on the refractive index (RI) of the gem material and all gems have different RI’s. Hence, when light passes through a gem and hits a polished facet, the minimum angle possible for the facet to reflect the light back into the gemstone is called the critical angle. If the pavilion of a gemstone is cut too deep or too shallow the light ray will hit the facet outside the critical angle and the light will escape outside of the stone. This is called unplanned light leakage.

Light Leakage

Stones with light leakage commonly display a “window” demonstrated in the picture below – a dull, unreflective area which severely compromises the stone’s beauty. This is well illustrated in the image below depicting a windowed Tanzanite oval next to a well cut piece.

Polishing

This is the final stage. The cutter will use a special polishing lap which is even finer than the faceting lap. It is also primed with very fine diamond powder. Each facet is then polished individually to a high sheen, giving the stone a fine lustre.

A good cutter will perform each step with intuition and skill leading to a symmetrical, scintillating, beautiful finished piece. It takes many years to attain a high level of competence in this art and highly skilled cutters are revered in the trade for their ability to visualize how a piece of rough can be transformed into something of great beauty whilst balancing a host of considerations and challenges along the way.

What Can Go Wrong?

When you see a beautifully cut gemstone in a piece of jewellery, its beauty can be captivating. However, very rarely is the sheer skill and risk involved in cutting rare gems appreciated.

Cutting rare gemstones like Tanzanite can be a risky business indeed. So many things can go wrong along the way for the gem cutter. He starts with a simple piece of rough which can be very unexciting to look at and is faced with the task of transforming it into something exceptional. Preforming is the first stage after the rough has been carefully evaluated for inclusions and to ascertain which shape would be best to cut. This is a risky stage as the rough is preformed by hand using a spinning faceting disk. Heat is generated at this point and often non-visible stress fractures can exist within a stone which can cause the stone to shatter or break at this stage.

This problem is not limited to coloured gemstones and Diamonds often cause great distress by performing the same trick on their beleaguered cutters! So next time you are looking at a beautiful faceted gemstone, whether Diamond or coloured stone, appreciate the great skill and pure miracle that it has survived several hundred million years under pressure and heat in the earth and then successfully navigated the path through the cutting process!