Gem Service cutting - Every sapphire on this site is hand-cut or hand-recut in our Sri Lanka workshop. Cutting a sapphire well is the difference between a stone that sits in a setting like dead glass and a stone that performs — that flashes, that holds color across angles, that holds up to the years of wear it'll see on a finger or pendant. It's the part of the supply chain most online gemstone sellers outsource and most customers never see. We take it seriously because everything else about a sapphire begins with the cut.

What we do

Our Gem Service cutting process has five stages:

1. Rough sorting. Rough sapphire crystals come to us from Sri Lanka's mining network. We sort by color, clarity, crystal habit, and apparent yield. The decision of which stones to cut and how to cut them happens here, before any wheel touches the rough.

2. Planning the cut. For each piece of rough we plan the cut to maximize what matters most — usually color performance and brilliance, sometimes carat weight, occasionally a specific shape requested by a customer. The plan accounts for the orientation of the C-axis (the optical direction of the crystal), which determines how color reads face-up.

3. Preforming. The rough is shaped on a coarse wheel to the planned outline. This is the stage where you commit to oval vs cushion, square vs rectangle, the rough proportions of the final stone.

4. Faceting. The preform is faceted on progressively finer wheels. Crown facets are cut first, then the pavilion, then the table. The number, angle, and proportion of facets determine the stone's light return.

5. Polishing. Each facet is polished individually on a fine wheel. Polish quality affects both light return and surface gloss. Poor polish dulls a stone permanently.