Breathing new life into a badly cut stone!

I just finished a re cut on a 15 carat stone for a client and thought it would be a good opportunity to blog on the process.

The gemstone pictured  was badly windowed and lifeless due to a belly on the underside/pavilion of the stone,the client wanted a complete re cut so the material lost in the process was somewhat determined beforehand.The next picture shows the cut and pre polished pavilion and girdle.

This shot shows the finished product which is a huge improvement on the old cut,the finished size came in at 13mm as opposed to the 15.5mm original size,the overall weight was down by around 50% which is not bad considering most of the excess weight was in the useless rounded pavilion which did nothing except save weight initially.To the uninitiated more weight = a better,more valuable  stone...uh...not really.
Good candidates for re cutting are big poorly cut stones which will still yield a good size when re cut,scratched pitted stones usually make good re cutting material because they can just be re polished without removing much material and the original design can be kept the same.
Custom Cut Gems