Phil Youngman Angelized
Gemstone Cutting in America
©Copyright 2015: Richard von
Sternberg, All Rights Reserved
TUCSON GEM SHOW
In the late 1970’s and early
1980’s, the Doubletree in Tucson was the place to find the major players in the
gemstone industry from all around the world every February as they assembled
their booths containing loose gems,
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| Gem quality Cambodian Zircons from my private collection of gems. This photo was taken by Tino Hammid, now deceased, and used in Modern Jeweler in an article about Zircons. |
hundreds of millions of dollars worth of
loose gems of the familiar variety: emeralds, sapphires, rubies, the ones given
the misnomer of “precious gems," as well as less familiar loose gems: spinels,
tourmalines, tanzanites, tsavorites, alexandrites, African amethysts, rhodolite
garnets, chrome tourmalines, zircons, and others also in a misnomer-type category of
“semi-precious” gemstones.
When I was a student of
gemology in the 1970’s, I learned why those terms were misnomers, why
“precious” and “semi-precious” as terms can be applied innocently in a
preposterous kind of way. We all carry
inside us the notion that precious is an adjective we use to describe things
that are rare, special, finer, things that most people cannot afford. This, in other words, might be the general
perception of “precious”.
PRECIOUS VERSUS
SEMI-PRECIOUS: the Alexandrite
Let’s use the example of the
alexandrite gemstone, the color-changing variety of chrysoberyl, made forever
famous by Alexander II, the czar of Russia who declared these his absolute
favorite gem, hence the name Alexandrite.
While I was a student of gems, it granted status among gem collectors
and sellers to have an alexandrite over 3 carats. If it was clean to the eye – one in which it
was necessary to utilize a jeweler’s loupe to see any internal imperfections –
it was rare. So rare that you could almost
make those sellers and collectors apoplectic with a 10 carat alexandrite.
Every time one fine
alexandrite over 3 carats was found in Russia, Sri Lanka, Africa, or wherever
one happened to appear, for each one of these, hundreds of fine rubies were
found, thousands of fine sapphires, tens of thousands of fine emeralds and hundreds
of thousands of fine diamonds were uncovered.
One dealer from Colombia with
a space at the Doubletree had two booths filled with extremely fine emeralds
one year.
He had them from melee (very
small cut gems used as accent or side stones) through standard sizes of ¼ ct, ½
ct and up through 1, 2 and 3 carats in the thousands of stones, then a hundred
or more individual eye-popping, perfect bluish green gems for 1 to 5 million
dollars each.
The fellow made a statement in the world of emeralds that was impossible to forget, impossible to surpass.
Had anybody, even a person
with unlimited financing, attempted to create a double booth of fine
alexandrites with the same amount and sizes of gem quality material, it simply
would not have been possible due to the extreme scarcity of the highly coveted
alexandrite, rarest of the colored gems at the time. This is why it seems preposterous to call
alexandrites SEMI-precious while rubies, sapphires, emeralds and diamonds, which
can be hauled in by the boxcar load, merit the special category of
FULLY-precious.
Or to label a rare demantoid
garnet,
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| Ultra rare Demantoid garnet |
a magenta imperial topaz, an electric blue Paraiba tourmaline, a
sapphire colored aquamarine, a gem specimen chrome tourmaline or a large, ruby
red Burmese spinel as semi-precious; well, it is a throwback to times of
royalty when the precious gems were ones that were highlighted in the crowns
and tiaras of the rich and powerful.
It is the nature of the
gemstone world to be continually updating its lore since the science of
gemology only dates back to the time of the Second World War, but gems
themselves were being heated to change their color during the time of Christ
and used ornamentally 2000 years before that.
We learned in the 1800’s to make fine gem look-alikes in
laboratories. By the time gem scientists
came along, they had their work cut out for them.
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| Ruby memory from childhood dashed by gemologists |
One of the more momentous of
the discoveries of the new, scientific approach to gemology was the recategorization
of a large red gem in one of the crowns that was in textbooks from my childhood
memories, the one I thought of hundreds of times after seeing only pictures of
the big ruby in the crown jewels. The
big ruby, however, was not a ruby at all, but a spinel. A red spinel and a red ruby are seen as the
same by most eyes.
Having a gem mounted into a
piece of jewelry makes it difficult for even the gemological scientist to
ascertain a positive gem species identification at times. Loose gems are what gemstone laboratories are
prepared to identify, not mounted ones.
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| A refractometer allows you to place a loose gem face down and read the gauge to see how much it bends light, and hence what stone type it is |
The refractive index of ruby is approximately 1.76, while that of spinel
is approximately 1.71. These numbers are
a measure of the extent to which light is bent as it passes through any
particular substance or medium. There
is a notable difference between spinel and ruby.
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| With the unaided eye, about all one can do is guess which is which. Which is the ruby? Which is the spinel? |
Rubies and spinels in the
rough crystal state are easy to separate after a few minutes of training
because rubies are doubly refractive while spinels are singly refractive. This means that light is bent one time in one
type of crystal and twice in another. If
you have a ruby crystal and a spinel crystal, both the same color and weight,
both equally transparent, all you need to do is spin them on their axes and
watch to see which one blinks while it gets lighter and darker as you spin it
and which does not do any of that. The
one that blinks is the ruby because it is doubly refractive.
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| A gemologist studies a gem in a piece of jewelry using a Raman Spectrometer to determine the type of gemstone in the ring |
Of course it is not possible
to make such a determination of a large gem mounted in a heavy gold crown. Careful study with a refractometer and other
laboratory instruments and identification techniques used to isolate a gem
species, allowed gemological science to say unequivocally that the ruby was a
spinel.
If you go into the market
looking for a gem-quality red spinel of three carats at any of the major world
gem shows (Tucson, Basel, Idar-Oberstein, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Las Vegas) and a
three carat classic red ruby at the same time, by the end of your tour you will
have seen many rubies but very, very few spinels. And, of course, ruby is called the precious
one while spinel is referred to as semi-precious, notwithstanding fine ruby
production far exceeds that of fine spinel.
MY INITIATION TO TUCSON
The “Nectar of the gods” in
the way of gems was at the Doubletree. I
was new to the gem business on my first couple of trips to Tucson, so the
Doubletree was, for me, the place where the theory of gems came to life. Believe it or not, it is possible to become a
gemologist by correspondence and see very few gems in person. I was one of the correspondence types who did
well in my coursework, but felt my gem spirit come to life at Tucson walking up
and down the aisles in what had become an international bazaar of gemstone
dealers from every part of the earth peddling wares from dinosaur bones, meteorites
and rock specimens to exotic pearls, opals, museum quality specimens of uncut
crystals to the finest qualities of cut, unmounted gemstones all the known
varieties they come in.
Spread throughout a couple of
dozen hotels in their parking lots, lobbies, guest rooms and conference rooms
all over the Tucson area, you can see it all, buy it all, or sell it all to the
thousands of people in the jewelry industry who show up to trade as you hear 10
different languages being spoken at the same time all around you. Gemstone action was all over Tucson, but the
super quality, super fine, super precious material was mostly at the Doubletree
and a couple of days of exposure to it filled in all the blanks that were
missing in my gemology education by letting me look at hundreds of millions of
dollars worth of what the most sophisticated minds in the industry considered
to be the best specimens of important gem types available on the planet.
PHILLIP YOUNGMAN STUNS GEM
LOVERS AT TUCSON
Phillip Youngman was
discovered at the Holiday Inn Broadway which, after I met him and was exposed
to his work, felt like the ultimate irony of the state of the gem world, such
as it was in its beginnings where, paradoxically, the number one person in gem
cutting was at the number two gem show.
Whereas the Doubletree helped determine the pecking order of the people
with gems at the top of the quality and value scale, the Holiday Inn offered a
much broader range of qualities of materials in the gemstone displays from
commercial material, the kind used in department store jewelry all the way to
finer gems used by designers of jewelry and custom gold and platinum
smiths. Having traveled the aisles of
the Holiday Inn long enough to have become familiar with the variety of
qualities available, I was thunderstruck and transfixed almost to the edges of
my own mortality when I felt an electromagnetic tug coming from Youngman’s
booth.
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| What Phil Youngman does to a gemstone makes a forever impression |
I looked over his way,
expecting to continue along my path of cursory looks of semi-familiarization at
the blur of booths and hawkers, and stopped walking, approached Phil’s booth and
stood there looking at him, seeing a friendly, serious face with no special
cockiness, no supercilious glare from one eye, yet each gem displayed in the
show cases was a wondrous work of art from a surefooted master who had earned
the social right to be proud, each gem was playing music, dancing as I moved
even a little, firing off wild 4th of July sparks of
scintillation. Stepping back a foot or
so to be able to take in all of the gems at once, I imbibed the effect of the
gems as I saw them, felt how synchronized was the music each gem played, as if
they were all part of a gem symphony that set off fireworks and had musical
crescendos as I moved my head. There was
nothing even close to this experience available at any other booth anywhere in
Tucson, not even in booths where some of the individual gems were in the
hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars.
WHERE DO THEY CUT MOST GEMS?
I had already been a student of gemology and appraised several hundred pieces of jewelry by the time I took my first trip to the Tucson show. I had looked analytically at thousands of stones and had done so after hundreds of hours of textbook learning about gems of all types, shapes, cuts and calibration.
Let me establish some
background here to create a context in which to understand what I am going to
say about the world of gemstone cutting and polishing.
--Most of the cutting is done
in the third world in places where workers make 1 to 4 dollars per day.
--Gemstones, whether rough
crystals or finished gems, are sold by weight, by the carat, a unit of weight
used just for gems that equals approximately 1/150 of an ounce.
--If a gemstone sells for,
say, 10 thousand dollars per carat, a half carat of that type of gem would be
5000 dollars. Does that mean a 1 carat
would be 10 thousand? No. As you go up the size scale, the price per
carat LEAPS upward. A one carat might
cost 20 instead of 10. A three carat
might cost 100 thousand because the trip upward in the size scale of price
lists is a geometric climb as the size ranges of crystals needed to produce
such stones becomes rarer and rarer.
--Looked at from the other
side of the coin, a cutter who finishes a gem at .99 carat instead of 1.00
carat, may have cost his company several thousand dollars by not having saved
that tiny, tiny amount of weight by doing something in the cutting to lose less
weight.
--Every act motivated only by saving weight is an act that sacrifices
beauty in a finished gem. This is
critically important to understanding the gemstone world. Especially if one is interested in
understanding BOTH SIDES of the gem world.
--Some cutting firms have as
many as 5000 cutters working. If none of
the cutters is careful to retain as much weight as possible, the tens of
thousands of dollars lost at each cutting wheel turn into millions of dollars
per week,
SAVE WEIGHT OR DIE
When a cutting firm buys a
parcel of rough and puts it in the cutting queue, the number of pieces of rough
and the weight of each piece is recorded in a journal. Each piece is marked for cutting by the
company’s experts and each cutter is expected to leave as much of the original
crystal weight in place as possible during cutting so that later, when the
total weight loss is tallied at the end of the process, there is profit possible
when the goods are sold.
A student of gemology will be
exposed to cutting charts for various shapes and cuts of gems during his or her
learning time. The drawings of the
various cuts are typically the results of gemstone engineering that takes into consideration
all the angles that have to be on every facet of every gem type in order to
make light move around inside a cut stone and return it to the eye of the
wearer or admirer of that gem.
This
phenomenon of light control is the key to the science behind the cutting of
gems, not the science behind the making of profit. To make
the cuts look like the textbook engineered models is to make a bloody sacrifice
when it comes to weight loss. 30 to 40%
more weight is lost to cut any gem to the proportions that make light movement
turn into brilliance, sparkle, fire, and beauty. To leave the goal of beautiful out of the
equation, in other words, retains vast amounts of useless crystal, material
that takes away from the overall impact of what a gemstone can do with light,
but lets you tally up more weight on the scale when you sell it and put more
money in your pocket.
Unless, of course, you charge
much more per carat for your gems if you cut them properly.
ONLY PHIL’S CUTS LOOKED LIKE
THE TEXTBOOK RENDERINGS
The Tucson show went on for
many days. By the end of the show, most
dealers were wondering what they were going to do with all they had left. Maybe have a big sale the last day just to
get rid of the leftovers. By the end of
the show, Phil Youngman was long gone.
He sold out half way through the second day.
The reckoning of the impact
of the show on Phil his first time there was that there were enough people who
“got it” about the supreme difference it made to have a cutting artist aim each
gemstone’s facets at each other with three dimensional symmetry and achieve
unheard of beauty, that they were willing to pay much more to put perfectly cut
colored gemstones into their jewelry.
ONE MAN SHOW
Phil was in a space of his
own in the market, a niche that not just anybody could jump into. You had to be a Phil Youngman type to carry
it all the way through: an artist motivated by a never-ending thirst for the
creative, for a chance to convert random into order. In Phil’s case, a chance to hew from a rough
crystal a sparkling, twinkling soul-catching colored gemstone, whatever happens
to come into his possession. Youngman
has won awards for his cutting, first place, honorable mention, star of show,
so many times that it impresses to see a list of all the times. Not just anybody can drop into the perfectly
cut gemstone niche, but for Phil, being in that niche is an extension of his
natural self.
Years ago Phil probably could
have tutored a few apprentices, generated inventory, commissioned road warriors
and captured a huge portion of the colored gemstone market through retail
jewelers everywhere. Applying his
cutting standards systematically would have magnified the niche he began with
to a measurable percentage of pure market share. This would not, however, have been the cloak
that Phil the artist could have donned and remained himself. It would have become necessary to trade
passion for business frenzy and pressure to produce, trade a need to keep
growing for the thrill of the hunt for the perfect crystal and the execution of
its transformation into an exemplary, textbook perfect, yet highly imaginative
brilliant piece of gemstone art.
Phil preferred to be a
one-man-show from the beginning. I was
in the gem business and asked Phil to let me carry his gems. Without in any way diluting or distorting our
friendship, he would always say “No, thank you.” For me it was a no-brainer because I was in
and out of jewelry stores constantly selling what I had purchased or had cut
overseas. To add Phil’s gems to my
inventory would have had the angelizing effect that salespeople everywhere
dream of. It would have been the
ultimate dab of frosting on the proverbial image cake.
But Phil knew himself well
and knew better than to make obligations that turn into pressures because most
artists I have known are highly tuned, sensitive souls who do not do well when feeling
they are disappointing people. They like
to work by muse time, work when the muse strikes, not when the clock strikes.
It made sense to me that Phil said no.
Especially then when there were so few real gem cutters in America that very little was
imported to this country in the way of rough gems for sale, except for what was
mined here and plentiful: agate, jasper, garnet, tourmaline, kunzite,
morganite, quartz that is clear, tourmalinated, rutilated quartz as well, gold
in quartz, moonstone, sunstone, red beryl and a few other things, none of which
Phil was interested in cutting. He was learning, connecting to suppliers
of rough gemstone crystals, people who were sourcing in places where important
gems were coming from: Africa, Asia and Brazil.
One day, as a gemstone
seller, I was introduced to a very important retail jeweler in northern California
who felt I had a good selection of gems he needed, who ended up picking the
finest of everything I brought back from my trips overseas, a jeweler with an
especially good eye. I remember during
our meeting having my eyes attracted to certain pieces of jewelry in his
display cases that made me ask about them.
“Oh, those are rings set with Phil Youngman cuts”, was what they told
me. It was the first time I had seen
Phil’s gems set into pieces, higher karat gold, stylish pieces with accent
diamonds. All the sales people were
talking about Phil Youngman every time I went to that store. The owner was a smart marketer and was making
a strong statement about Phil and what it did to his jewelry to set perfectly
cut stones into inventory. He had loose stones
cut by Phil and ones mounted into fine jewelry in cases to use as a point of
departure in sales of the finest jewelry in the store. In that environment, Phil’s breathtaking
gemstone cutting was imprinted so deeply into any gemstone he had cut that its
magnificence made the piece of jewelry it was set into the invariable winner.
STONE TYPES
Besides raising the bar
through the precision of his cutting, Phil accomplished something that was
serendipitous, something not written into the business plan: he elevated
cutting to such a fine art with such perfect consistency, that he, himself,
Phil the artist, became the medium being exchanged, no matter which gem type,
for whatever art he created. I saw
something occur in the aforementioned jewelry store that established in my mind
forever the invisible phenomenon of the effect of Phil Youngman’s cutting on
people. The cutting is more important
than the gem type, the shape, the laboratory particulars. In that store one day, a customer came in
looking for a tanzanite and was mesmerized by Phil’s cutting, disappointed that
there were no tanzanites in stock that moment that were cut by Phil. One of the clerks at the store called Phil,
ascertained that he had a tanzanite.
Without even caring about the particulars, that customer bought it
without seeing it simply because it was cut by Phil.
That was eye-opening for me
because it confirmed what the authors of the text material in the gemology
courses I took, as well as authors of coffee-table size books about gems, were
saying about the importance of the quality of the cutting to the beauty of
gems, a truth that, as I mentioned, was buried in the strictly competitive,
non-artisan approach to gem cutting that focused only on profit and weight retention. Where the rubber meets the road, at the
counters of the jewelry stores where people can experience the best there is in
gem cutting, a very large number of people open up to it, adjust and forget
about how much more it costs to have beauty in mind while cutting and take away
a piece of jewelry that is a unique work of art.
THE MOST IMPORTANT DECISIONS ARE MADE IN THE HEART
"A brand is a product, service, or concept that is publicly distinguished from other products, services, or concepts so that it can be easily communicated and usually marketed. A brand name is the name of the distinctive product, service, or concept. Branding is the process of creating and disseminating the brand name." (Bogdan Parcanschi, 2010)
There is powerful magic in a brand that is simply unavailable in ordinary or imitation products.
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| A brand so successful you have to get on a waiting list to get one |
I believe that is because a brand shows regularization, consistency, something you can count on, and something that appeals to the sense of bonding with the familiar in us. If a brand has a history that goes back to the beginning of something, and if that beginning came about or became a movement inspired by the brand, the product feels trustworthy and can enter the heart, make us feel proud to own whatever it is. This rich, heartfelt feeling is universally desired as is evidenced by the long list of brands with billions of followers. Or those brands that are so rare and powerfully desirable that one has to get on a waiting list to get one, something that individual fine artists are familiar with once they have achieved notoriety and general recognition.
The Phil Youngman cut is, of course, a brand of colored gemstone that has its origins in the accomplishments of one American individual who poured his very all into his deepest passion and elevated the entire matter from one end of the gem trade to the other, inspiring other Renaissance types like himself to enter the gem world and be more readily accepted because of the trail he blazed. He made sure that the approach in his heart was applied equally to every single work of art he created from the first gem he cut, infusing, as a result, his own personal energetic signature on each piece. With all this in mind, a wearer or collector of gemstones can easily open up his or her heart to this great artist knowing that whatever Phil has cut can be counted on to have been cut directly from the heart of the master and embellish the power of the gem to make the heart want it more than if anybody else had cut it. You can pick up any Phil Youngman gem and see in it all the elements of the revolution Phil began, connect in your mind with time and space and know that you are holding a Phil Youngman gem and feel something special happening to you.
Dexterous cutting had made
the legend and the cutter, Phil, had perpetuated it through Tucson out into the
world and into that one store I was in that knew what to tell people about
Phil, how to show his work. Among people
with taste and a penchant for finer things mixed with passion for gemstones,
Phil’s artwork was a proven seller.
WHAT IS IT THAT CAUSES THE GEM
HYPNOSIS?
A great perspective to have
in order to appreciate what a superior gem cutter does is within your
experience if you have ever seen a house located on a busy road, or a blind
curve, that has a large mirror that catches the oncoming traffic not visible to
the driver exiting the driveway and reflects it to him or her, allowing the
driver to know if there are cars coming before pulling out onto the road. It is critical what direction that mirror is
turned; it can be a life or death matter.
If you can see that mirror in your mind, imagine turning it just a tiny
bit to the left or right and think about what a huge difference that tiny bit
makes to what the driver sees.
Or think about your own rear
view mirror and the side mirrors and the positive and negative results of your
minor adjustments.
The surface of a faceted
gemstone can be anywhere from tightly organized geometrically all the way to
sloppy. The sloppy ones let light pass
through them that, in the correctly cut ones, would reflect the light in such a
way as to KEEP IT IN THE STONE, bending it just enough to send it along to
another facet surface INSIDE the gem to be bent again a time or two and then
made to exit according to a plan that would aim it to the eye of the
viewer. The sloppy ones “leak” light,
the well cut ones do not. The sloppy
ones have less life than the well cut ones because brilliance and beauty in
gems do not occur by accident.
WHAT THE IDEAL GEM CUTTER HAS
TO DO
Working from the outside of a
gemstone, it is the job of the cutter to arrange the insides of the facets to
act like mirrors deliberately aligned to send light on a path in the stone,
around the inside, and back out again, only to your eye. It is the alignment of these mirrors that
makes ideally cut gems superior. This is
very, very tricky business, humbling to cutters of gemstones. Tiny tweaks with
the angle adjustment knob on the cutting equipment make HUGE differences in
where the light goes. This is why a
stone that comes from factory X in the third world has little to no chance of
being a stunning gem except from the body color of the crystal it was cut from,
for a beautiful gem can even be exciting to the eye in its natural, rough
state. The more resolute the cutter is
in applying the principles of light flow and perfect facet alignment, the more
the rough crystal buzzes and radiates beauty in its finished state.
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| If all the inside mirrors are aimed perfectly, the light has a perfect path to follow into and out of the gem. While bending as it reflects away from one surface to another, FIRE is created as the light is prismatically broken into its spectral colors. The better the cutting, the more fire and brilliance is created. |
Phillip Youngman is a gifted
artist who brings to the cutting wheel the consciousness and experience of
geniuses of all the media of artistic persuasions: painters like Rembrandt,
sculptors like Michelangelo, photographers like Cartier-Bresson, or my brother,
Robert von Sternberg, musicians like Yo-Yo Ma, people who make impressions that
are so pure, they ring within us and make us feel something we cannot, except
from those exemplary masters we all look up to.
In the world of gemstones, Phil is exemplary in his imbuing life and
spirit into each masterpiece he creates.
WHAT MAKES THE GEMS PHIL CUTS
THE WORK OF AN ARTIST?
Hobbyists find fun,
extracurricular things to do in life.
For a person who doesn’t mind working every day, but who does not feel
life-fulfilled by it, a hobby can take up the slack, an interest, a special
activity that takes one into a different, engaging world that remains always
ready for us when we are ready for it.
Some of us are vacuumed in at a deeper level to the engaging world and
spend more time there. Perhaps I am
pointing here to the line between the hobbyist and the enthusiast. At level two, one joins clubs and organizations
that are about our special interest, surfs the net about the hobby, subscribes
to magazines, attends meetings and conventions, feels part of something like a
movement.
At level three we find the
possessed artist, the one whose passion has risen far
THE AMERICAN
RENAISSANCE
We must all
have our favorite warm childhood memories that we can see as our own building
blocks as we get older, our boosts of self-confidence, our special human
connections, our mystical connections with the earth. Phil’s character was
partially shaped by a grandfather who owned some tungsten mines in the Sierras. As a little boy Phil trotted along behind his
grandpa, “A cool guy”, Phil once told me, gathering quartz crystals. These magical outcroppings of quartz crystals
offered Phil his childhood mystical fantasy of the power and beauty of the
Earth, the regularity and patterning of the crystals extruding from the surface
of our planet, a place where they were in abundance, crystals of the type used
by amateur radio operators to receive radio signals.
Phil began singing in his high
school choir and became enthusiastic about it in the great Central Valley of
California. When he was 15 he went to a
pawn shop, purchased an electric guitar and practiced seriously, joined a band
and played electric until 18 when he switched to bass.
Having been born in Fresno in
1946, he was of the generation that was subject to the draft. His musical machinations took a swerve as he
enlisted in the Air Force and were put on hold until he returned to civilian
life and began to attend Riverside City College. Out of the service, back in school, he jumped
back into music and began playing 4 to 5 nights a week in nightclubs. He got his AA diploma from the college and
kept playing music, doing well enough to keep things moving in life, moving far
enough to have taken up the hobby of amateur gemstone polishing.
Phil came of age in a time
when the general outlook was positive, especially in California. The Silicon Valley erupted into an economic
miracle that spread many directions and paid big bonuses and dividends to
investors and executives of firms. For a
time there, about the time I got into the gemstone business, people were
staying in swank hotels, buying art, real estate, jewelry, antiques. It was not uncommon for a vacationer to drop
50 thousand dollars in a jewelry store in La Jolla, Santa Monica, Santa
Barbara, Carmel, Palo Alto, Sausalito or any number of similar places. When I traveled on the road with colored
gemstones, there was so much business that I could travel to obscure little
towns where jewelers could not correctly pronounce the names of the gems they
were buying, but were selling them and asking for more.
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| Phil Youngman, turned around looking at the camera, looks over gem offerings in Madagascar |
Phil’s introduction to the
market in Tucson couldn’t have been at a better time because gems were
moving. Phil was busy for a long
time. He had made a friend who purchased
rough from around the world and was able to supply him enough material to keep
his shows stocked. His exposure over the
years in Tucson to the whole jewelry industry brought him opportunities to meet
the most important players in it granting him the ability to experience the
highs and the lows of economies as well as the highs and lows of humanity
personified in the microcosm of the gemstone world as he traveled from country
to country, gem-center to gem-center getting as close to the source as
possible.
In the 1990’s Phil’s gem provenance
was at a point high enough to satisfy just about anyone’s hope for
accomplishment as the American Gem Trade Association began their praises of his
cutting. He was given the highest honors
for many varieties of gems including topaz, tanzanite, citrine, rhodolite
garnet, zircon, matching stones and suites of gems and, later, reinvented his
magic in corundum (the generic name for ruby and sapphire) and has since
identified the sapphire as his “sweet spot” in the gem world.
At some point the constant
alone time in his cutting shop and the everyday mundane details of running a
business, like shipping, billing, collecting receivables, getting phone orders,
feeling pressured, made Phil ponder life as a retiree and he decided to give up
his round-the-world life of the gemological gumshoe. Over the years, occurring in the background
of Phil’s world was the mom-and-pop jeweler becoming something of an endangered
species and made a part of history by the statistical truth: Walmart is the number one seller of diamonds
in America, Costco is number two. His
retirement thoughts were, as most of his thinking, timely from the perspective
of the infrastructure that supported him and the thousands of people in the gem
industry being earthquake shaken by the internet. In short, during Phil’s eminent tenure as a
preeminent gem cutter, the slowly changing kaleidoscope of life, hurried along
by the advent of the internet, offered a view to Phil that was so different
than when he entered the trade, he had to think twice about continuing in it.
KEEPING IN TOUCH
I have always thought of Phil
as a special friend who understood things from a perspective I personally
identify with and appreciate. We have
kept in touch over the years, sometimes often and sometimes with pauses long
enough that changes have taken place.
Because I had a career in diamonds that paralleled Phil’s in color, one
which was about the mastery of the perfect cut, but in diamonds, we have always
had a lot to share.
 |
| Not able to love retirement, knowing himself well, Phil stepped back into gem sleuthing. Here he is in Madagascae again. |
Retirement was not appealing
in the end, at least not full retirement, for Phil. After thriving for years from the deep
business relationships that form the cellular structure of all the organs of
the gem business and the bonds formed in Sri Lanka particularly, Phil has
decided to keep the wheel turning, literally and figuratively, but this time is
not feeling the need he once did of doing everything himself.
The production capacity of a
one-man-show artist is finite. Every
lover of gemstones would gladly have a Youngman cut were they made aware of it,
but only in dreams could there be a way for one individual to satisfy an
endless market. The production will
continue to be small and manageable. He
will still travel to Asia and Africa to find the raw material of his craft,
knowing he will not be able to supply more than a handful of very fine jewelers
who resonate with what Phil does, who want to create a symbiosis between Phil’s
gems and their own artwork in precious and strategic metals.
Richard von Sternberg, November
13, 2015 (updated May 6, 2018)
