Being transparent
9th August 2019
When you are setting a transparent gem you have to be very aware of what is casting colour onto and into it. That would certainly be the case with this 13mm long, 11mm wide and 9mm deep gem.
When I first start work on a design for a customers gemstone one of the first things I do is take photos for measurements. You can see in the second photo above that when I used bluetac to take a photo of the gems depth it changed the colour of gem markedly.
The Design
With a transparent gem often parts of the setting that are close to the gem are visible inside the gem and/or cast shadows. In most cases this is not desirable. Often it is not totally avoidable but we can minimise it.
For this ring we decided to leave as much of the space directly under the gem open. In the second photo you can see that we have done that also with the side view.
Now for the colour twist
You might rightly be thinking that a white precious metal will not cast much colour into the gem. You would be correct but the ring pictured above was a draft of the planned ring made in silver that I used to confirm the design and finger size before I made the actual ring.
The actual ring was made in rose gold and you can see the effect it had on the gems colour. You can also see some of the setting visible through the gem.
When dealing with transparent gems you need to plan for these issues and be realistic about the results possible. In the case of this ring both the customer and I think it gives the ring even more character.