Phillip Youngman Master Gemstone Artist

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, 

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, 

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. 

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.  

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.

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.

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.

The next place to be was the Holiday Inn Broadway.  After a few years the Doubletree was left behind by the big players who preferred to display with the American Gem Trade Association (AGTA) at the Convention Center.  The Holiday Inn Broadway underwent a name change and the whole industry changed again and again during the 30 years I spent in it, but in the beginning, it was the Doubletree and the Holiday Inn Broadway that were the two most important shows.  The AGTA was at the Doubletree and the GLDA, another gem trade association, was at the Holiday Inn.  Back then you had to say Holiday Inn Broadway because there were gem shows running concurrently at more than one Holiday Inn.

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.

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 4^th 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

In Phil Youngman’s booth, every facet was where it was supposed to be.  All the stones that were 5 carats in Phil’s display would have been 7 to 8 carat gems in other displays.  When it came time to pay for the gem, to the uninitiated and untrained, it APPEARED one was getting a lot more for the money from the dealer that sold run-of-the-mill cut gems, but to the person who was wrapped up in the fabulous sparkle and scintillation that was pounding out of Phil’s cuts like music from great classical symphonies, here was home.  Here was the only place where you could see that the motivation to achieve profit had been relegated to “hoped for” and the righteousness and rectitude of science and the rhythm of the movement of light were the goal at Phil’s cutting wheel, weight loss be damned.

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.

TESTED IN THE REAL MARKET

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.  

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.

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

beyond the first flames of a fire, risen to the state of embers and coals sustaining the passion with a kind of perpetual motion needing only more fuel to keep burning.  The artist has become so close to the hobby that they consume each other, feed each other.  The pure artist knows the special ride on the bow of the ship, the “shooting” of the curl of a perfect wave, the deep and personal engagement with the forefront of a movement, influencing the course of events from goodness, not intentionally, but by the way of the kinetic energy that allows us to ride a bicycle without thinking about balance.

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.

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)