Much More Beautiful Diamonds—Part 2--What happened in Japan

Much More Beautiful Diamonds—Part 2

     What happened to diamonds in Japan

©Copyright 2012: Richard von Sternberg, All Rights Reserved

In my last blog post, which I called “Much More Beautiful Diamonds—Part 1”, I attempted to give a sense of what must happen to the shape of a cut diamond in order for it to put on the light show diamonds are famous for.  I labeled the facets of a diamond and gave the proportions that are generally included in ideal diamond cutting standards.  Sample photographs were provided that show brilliance occurring, actual observable brilliance as seen in a Firescope as well as fire occurring, actual photographable rainbows being dispersed using a device I commissioned to be made by an MIT engineer with two advanced degrees.  My thesis is that the more perfectly cut a diamond is, the more beautiful it becomes as its power to unleash the spectacular play of color, brilliance and sparkle comes from a perfect man-made path of light.  With the invention of the Firescope (1984) came the first ability to actually see with one’s own eye what path light was taking in a diamond and, as a result, to judge the quality of its cutting in an intuitive way.

A Japanese entrepreneur, having just looked into a Firescope for the first time said: “With a shock it suddenly occurred to me that what we had here was a device that clearly and unmistakably showed how good or bad a diamond’s cut was.  All that was needed was the human eye.  All you had to do was look for yourself.”  This gentleman, a complete outsider to the world of diamonds, would eventually discover a huge hole in that world of diamonds and be sucked by its vacuum into the deepest chambers of the fine art of diamond cutting, or diamond polishing as it is referred to in the trade.

MR. TAMURA

Mr. Tamura is no ordinary person by the standards of any culture.  He is a natural leader, a handsome gentleman who can sing with a strong and beautiful voice, entertain an audience of thousands, build a business empire and go on to initiate a HUGE revolution in diamonds that has transformed the way diamonds are cut and polished, graded, certified, marketed, promoted and how, because of this man and myself, are sold with emphasis on actual optical proof of symmetrical cutting.

TAMURA AND SONY

Early in its history, Tamura-san approached Sony, impressed by their “out-of-the-box-and-into-action” philosophy, and told them he wanted to distribute their products.  He was a young man who could draw a crowd in Tokyo impersonating Elvis.  (I cannot think of anybody I ever met who knew so much about Elvis or was as fond of him as Mr. Tamura.) He was interesting in conversation, intelligent, far-seeing, mesmerizing.  They wanted him at Sony. 

He put one condition on his relationship that nearly cost him the empire he created: he insisted on being in business for himself.  Apparently there was some in-house discussion about whether Tamura should be an employee or not.  In the end, Tamura prevailed and went on to create the entrepreneurial dream of creating a nation-wide Sony distribution network with, at its apogee, 400 salespeople servicing accounts all over Japan.  He built a building in Yotsuya, a financial center of Tokyo, in the shape of a pyramid to symbolize his empire.

A SECONDARY REASON FOR RETIRING

One day in the 1970’s, on Tamura’s 43^rd birthday, he summoned a convocation of his employees and announced two things to them that were so profound as to be picked up on and reported by the media:

1.     Retiring

2.     Gifting the Company

Mr. Tamura was taxed and tired from forging the pioneer enterprise he did and was ready to break new sociological ground in Japan by retiring.  People didn’t retire in Japan in the sense we have come to understand retirement today.  He made headlines with this idea.  He announced his retirement at his convocation and made a gift of the company to his employees at the same time.  He actually gave away the company to its employees, in other words, a very newsworthy event.

Tamura’s acts sent out waves in all directions and brought lines of people to his door looking for opportunity, direction, and guidance from a master.  He gave everybody some time to say what they had to offer, only a little.  On his hidden agenda was his search for a new opportunity for himself, feeling too young at 43 to retire to a rocking chair.  One at a time people came in for a moment with Tamura, one at a time they were told thank you and good-bye.

A DIAMOND DEALER WITH BIG IDEAS

One day a man Tamura called Ken in his book showed up from what for Tamura was a different world, explaining he was a purveyor of diamonds.  Tamura said he could make the meeting quite easy and brief by announcing he was simply not interested in diamonds, then stood up and expected Ken to leave. “Diamonds leave me cold,” Tamura announced.  Ken surprised Tamura by saying he had brought a diamond to show with a cut based on science.  I was told a few years later it was this word science that caught his attention since he had never associated science with diamonds; only romance and high prices.  Ken was asked, “What does science have to do with it?”

Tamura was told about the physicist Tolkowsky, the physics of diamond proportioning and the importance of what Ken was referring to as ideally cut diamonds.  From a briefcase came a chart of cutting proportions similar to the one I put in my last blog posting. 

Tamura’s imagination was touched. He asked to see one of these ideal cut diamonds, looked at it, then remarked to Ken he thought it was beautiful.

The next question that Ken faced from Tamura, in my opinion, created a tiny niche in the history of diamond cutting that can be used as a kind of line of demarcation between the old way of looking at diamonds and the new one.  After all, Tamura’s curiosity had been stimulated by the science behind what Ken was telling him, it was no wonder Tamura assumed there was a tool or instrument Ken had with him that he could put the diamond in to demonstrate what the diamond did with light so he could see the truth for himself.  Did Ken have such an instrument was Tamura’s question.  Ken did not and found himself at a loss to explain why he could not build a bridge from the diagram of light moving in the diamond to the diamond itself.  Thinking of himself as easy prey to a salesman who could not completely demonstrate his product, Tamura reminded him that diamonds left him cold and told him his time was up.

On his way out Ken asked if he could return should he be able to produce such a device.  Tamura told him he would be delighted to see such an invention and Ken went off to invent.  He and experts he consulted with (in optics, plastics, manufacturing, physics, etc.) worked part-time for several years until one day they patented a device called the Firescope and trademarked its name, a name that has always seemed odd to me since, albeit it is a scope, it does not measure or demonstrate fire in a diamond as fire is the result of light being bent and broken down into colors.  It gives you a visual image of a diamond’s brilliance, not fire.  It would have made more sense to call it a Brilliancescope.

DIAMOND DEALER INVENTS SOMETHING

Nevertheless, Tamura was visited again and shown the Firescope and said the words from the beginning of this chapter: “With a shock it suddenly occurred to me that what we had here was a device that clearly and unmistakably showed how good or bad a diamond’s cut was.  All that was needed was the human eye.  All you had to do was look for yourself.” 

Ken did not have the deep pockets of Tamura.  Tamura did not have the stunning invention of Ken.  Tamura exclaimed there should be a Firescope in every jewelry store in the world so every consumer could really and truly see what they were buying.  He recalled how uncomfortable he felt buying his fiancé a diamond because he had to trust somebody he did not know and take his word for how he represented a diamond’s cutting, a diamond that was for sale for over 20 thousand dollars.  Ken heard “Firescope in every jewelry store in the world” as a symphony of cash registers playing his favorite melody.

CONTACTING DEBEERS

The two of them formed a partnership and decided to market the Firescope.  Tamura ordered plenty of them and kept them in boxes ready for the big rush once they were discovered.  Tamura contacted the international consortium of diamonds, DeBeers, to introduce the Firescope to them and, perhaps because of his social prominence, DeBeers agreed to see him.  A meeting was arranged with one of their representatives who said he felt the Firescope was among the most important gemological advances of his lifetime.

DeBeers has a booth at the three main jewelry trade shows held in America:  New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles.  In the middle of the 1980’s, Tamura and his partner were in the DeBeers booth at all three trade shows (it was Dallas then, not Las Vegas).  DeBeers sent out cover letters to the most important people in the industry world-wide expecting to have cutters and dealers lined up in deep lines to get their hands on the amazing new scope that told you EXACTLY how well (or how poorly) a diamond was cut.

IN JAPAN IT COMES FROM THE HEART

Anybody who has spent time in Japan has learned that you are expected to keep your word and be honest by the unwritten rules of the culture.  All acts are supposed to come from the heart, all products are supposed to be made with a heart-centered attitude.  Tamura told me he always assumed that a product such as a diamond, which costs thousands of dollars, would be treated with great reverence, so he was quite surprised to experience the disappointment of his many looks at diamonds and how they appeared in the Firescope to be just slapped together.  Even the ones in packets marked “ideal cut” or “perfect cut” appeared just plain awful in the scope.

THE FIRESCOPE IS UNFORGIVING

The lines of cutters and dealers that did form for the scopes disappeared quickly as word spread that this device would do nothing but show people everything the cutter did wrong when he cut the stone.  There were no takers.  Tamura became the first person in the history of diamonds to glimpse the truth about the way one of the most expensive commodities on earth was prepared for sale and it took him, and the rest of the entire jewelry industry, completely by surprise.

The idea of selling Firescopes to every jewelry store in the world evaporated and the business plan for the partners morphed into Tamura taking one single scope from diamond firm to diamond firm looking to amalgamate an inventory of diamonds that appeared perfectly cut in the Firescope.  “We will be the only people who can actually prove that we have an inventory of ideally cut diamonds.  All clients will be able to see for themselves,” Tamura explained to his partner as he embarked upon his journey into the wholesale and retail diamond centers of Tokyo.

HUNTING DOWN THE PERFECT CUT

Tamura did not care about the price.  He realized that what he was after was beyond rare; people would surely pay more, he reasoned, for what he could demonstrate with his scope.  With this in mind, he decided it did not matter whether he bought from a wholesaler, a retailer, a large department store, a cutter, an independent dealer.  Whoever could provide him with a diamond that appeared mostly red in his scope would get Tamura’s money. (White in the scope indicated light leakage in the diamond, a reflection of cutter error; where one saw red in the scope view of the diamond light was being “returned” to the viewer – as with a mirror.  White indicated problems, red indicated correct cutting.)

Tamura spent months meeting people in the diamond world, held out large amounts of cash for purchasing (Tamura was quite wealthy), the temptation that ordinarily gets instant results in buying markets of all types of merchandise all over the world.  The truth is that one of the greatest entrepreneurs in the history of Japan came up empty-handed.  NOBODY HAD EVEN ONE DIAMOND CUT RIGHT.  He told me he looked at 50 thousand diamonds.  What was happening during this uncharted, unprecedented expedition into Tokyo’s diamond inventories was that a genius from outside the industry, with no vested interest in the way diamonds are cut, with no reason to want cutters to save weight in cutting to please the accountancy divisions of their companies, this genius was building a mental databank of diamond OBJECTIVE observations in a medium that had never been explored, a medium that allowed the first real look at the effects of a cutter’s attempts to harness the light power of the crystal he or she began with.  At the end of a few months, even though his inventory safe was not filling up with great diamonds to sell, his mind was expanding exponentially with thoughts that would lead to the first diamond cut perfectly in the 500 year history of diamond cutting.

GO TO AMERICA, YOU’LL SURELY FIND IT THERE

Those diamond dealers who could refrain from becoming defensive about their product shared with Tamura that the problem might be that he was combing the wrong market.  They suggested he go to America to find the perfect diamonds he sought as it was known in the industry that the three firms in the world who claimed to sell only “ideal cuts” were companies whose names all started with K:  Kaplan, Keiger, Keppie.

Tamura had no idea which company to pursue, so he asked around for any information he might be given.  He found out that one company was based in New York, one in St. Louis, and one in Pittsburgh.  With absolutely nothing else to go by than this shred of information, Tamura, being an avid football fan, picked the J. C. Keppie Company, because the Pittsburgh Steelers were his favorite team.  He spent many days at this company looking at all 12 thousand of their diamonds, individually, in his Firescope.

THREE MAGIC STONES

At this place he ALMOST came up empty.  He went through their inventory starting with their important, expensive ones, deducing that the company would take especial care with the ones that cost many times what luxury cars sold for.  Not one of those was cut right.  He started systematically looking at diamonds under a carat, going through smaller and smaller ones until they were bringing him bags of 500 diamonds containing the little side stones people often refer to as “chips” in jewelry.  He went through several of these until he happened upon 3 diamonds, each one weighing .03 carat, that made a perfect reflection pattern in the Firescope indicating that every facet was symmetrically placed and that beams of light had perfect paths to follow in and out of these diamonds.

Sitting next to the other little diamonds, they practically jumped off the table they were so beautiful.

At the end of his research at the diamond facility in Pittsburgh, Tamura was in a position to conclude something that also shocked the diamond trade, to come to a conclusion that made the famous American diamond cutting company introspect, first itself as a company, then the cutting methods and practices it had absorbed through industry osmosis.  Tamura expressed his conclusions to the company’s owner this way: “When a company such as yours, dedicated to making every diamond be cut ideally, attempts to make a perfect cut, it happens by accident 1 time in 4000.”

Tamura showed the owner the three special diamonds he found in their inventory, left his Firescope with them and said he wanted them to cut him a complete inventory of diamonds this way, intentionally, not by accident.  They agreed to get started right away as they saw Tamura could turn out to be their very best client.  They struggled for months and finally concluded that it was not possible to deliberately cut diamonds the way the three little ones were cut. 

They were unable to do it because diamonds had grain inside them, invisible grain, that was like the grain in wood.  Working with the grain works well; working against the grain, things don’t go the way you want.  In diamonds working against the grain is impossible.  You cannot simply put a facet wherever you want it, facing any direction you choose.  You MUST work within the restrictions of the grain pattern of each diamond.  This one fact is what kept the diamond industry from succeeding in making diamonds cut symmetrically for 500 years. 

IS THERE SUCH A THING AS PERFECT ENOUGH?

Keppie gave up and told Tamura it was not financially feasible to continue the project and that they felt their diamonds were perfect enough.

As difficult as it is to pinpoint particular events or details that are the key elements in knowledge growth, consciousness expansion or the beginnings of movements, this event is clearly one of the catalytic key events that forever changed the industry’s approach to diamond cutting.  Tamura laughed and asked what the company’s owner would say if his doctor declared his wife was “pregnant enough”.  There was laughter on both ends of the phone, I am told.  This funny joke actually demonstrates the way the Japanese culture views perfection.  It is a yes/no proposition.  Something is either perfect or it is not.  There is no “perfect enough” when the impulse to manufacture comes from the heart.

Tamura decided at that moment to open his own diamond factory and make it a requirement of the factory to only allow Firescope perfect diamonds into the inventory, nothing short of that.  Tamura was able to comprehend the rarity of what he sought through his own personal expeditions into diamond wallets in scores of firms’ inventories, but he had yet to learn exactly why this was so, why it was so rare. 

In my next chapter I will talk about the process he began when he opened his factory and how I came to meet him and help him revolutionize the jewelry industry.

Much More Beautiful Diamonds—Part 1

Making Diamonds more Beautiful than ever

In my last blog post, which I called “Diamonds Growing on my Family Tree”, I explained a little of my family history connected to the diamond world, and showed the scales used around the world to gauge the color and clarity of a diamond.  With a photo of some rough diamond crystals I purchased in Antwerp in the 1990’s I explained how a diamond cutter takes two diamonds out of one crystal and, depending on how the cutting company perceives diamonds – as objects of wonder and beauty, or merely as vehicles to profit – the object of the company may be to cut diamonds “ideally” or to set about to retain as much weight from the original crystal as the cutter can squeeze, compromising the beauty in the process.

The Laws of Physics Applied to Diamonds

I believe in the power of a diamond to be infinitely more beautiful when certain laws of physics are applied in the cutting process, laws of science that describe what light does as it travels through space and different media, how much it bends and how much color it gives off as it bends when entering and exiting a medium of travel (such as air, water, gas or crystal).

In this drawing you can see the path of light one beam of light takes through a perfectly cut diamond.  The diamond in the drawing sits face up to a light source directly over it.  To the right of the light source is an eyeball of an imaginary observer who is seeing the ray of light coming from the light source through the medium of the diamond.  The light takes a straight path to the diamond, passes through the table (large facet on top) of the diamond and strikes a facet on the bottom of the diamond.

What happens next to the beam of light depends completely on the angle of the facet it strikes.  If the facet it strikes is parallel to the table, the light will pass through that facet, out the diamond and the observer will see no magic colors, no brilliant reflection, nothing special.  If the facet is at an angle of approximately 40.75 degrees to the table facet, the light will be bent in such a way as to NOT LEAVE THE DIAMOND and jump across the bottom of the diamond to another facet opposite it.

If that opposite facet is placed at the perfect angle, the light will be bent again, this time upward inside the diamond and still will not leave the diamond; instead it will strike a facet above the last one it struck.  If that upper facet is placed at approximately 34.50 degrees to the table facet, the light will be bent one more time as it passes through the top of the diamond and, in the process of refracting (bending) and exiting, will fire off a rainbow of color, literally.  The beam of white light will, upon exiting the diamond, be broken down into the color spectrum in the same order as the colors appear in a rainbow having used the diamond as a prism.

Who Formulated these Proportions and Angles?

The pure scientists who looked at diamonds with their objective bent over the centuries postulated there was some set of proportions that would lead diamonds to give off their best light show, proportions that were ideal for light entering carbon crystals which are what diamonds are.  All substances bend light differently. Or, put another way, each material has a particular degree to which it refracts light and is categorized thusly by its “refractive index”.  Diamond and zirconium have very high refractive indices and, when cut right, put on amazing light shows.

Scientists speculated, formulated, prophesized and argued about the proportions to which a diamond had to be cut in order to be its most beautiful for centuries until one Belgian scientist, a mathematician and physicist who studied at the University of London named Marcel Tolkowsky, picked up a tang (diamond cutting instrument) and put it to the wheel (the diamond dust-incrusted spinning metal plate that abrades the surface of diamonds) in the New York factory of Lazare Kaplan early in the 20^th century.  Kaplan was Tolkowsky’s cousin and was extremely interested in the outcome of his cousin’s experiments, hoping to get a stranglehold on the future of cutting diamonds to ideal proportions.

Tolkowsky was trying to find the right angles and proportions, measuring as effectively as science allowed with its unsophisticated instruments of the day.  He measured only the outside of diamonds, theorizing about light, but did not actually follow the path light was taking with the instrumentation that was to appear in gemological circles and cutting factories toward the end of the 20^th century.  His treatise about the enhancement of brilliance and fire produced by cutting to ideal proportions had merit and proved to be absolutely true.

The so-called Ideal Cut

Mr. Tolkowsky did not live long enough to see how true his ideas were nor how far he was from proving it since his proof relied only on measurements taken on the surfaces of diamonds.  Here is one institution’s sense of what constitutes ideal based heavily, but not entirely, on what Tolkowsky proposed as ideal cutting standards:

The Firescope—First big Breakthrough

In a later blog post I will tell the story of how some of today’s instrumentation came to exist since it is vital to understanding today’s diamond revolution and the role I played in it, but for now I just want to shed light on a device called the Firescope that allowed people with no background in gemology or physics to see with just their eye how well or poorly a diamond was cut.  The Firescope was invented in Japan as a response to one person’s questioning the validity and provability of Tolkowsky’s academic theories, a response from a man who wondered when a good theory is practical.



Here is how the Firescope achieves this "light study"



It was designed to send light into a diamond that was red in color to see how much red light came back out of the diamond.  Red in was the beginning of the path of light.  Red light back out indicated light did not pass through the diamond, but was REFLECTED back out the top of it causing brilliance to occur. 

Many years after we began cutting diamonds to make them appear correct in the Firescope, I commissioned a man with two degrees in physics from MIT to make me a scope (we called it the Dispersionscope in the beginning) that showed graphically how much FIRE a diamond was producing because the two most important elements of a diamond’s beauty are fire and brilliance. 

Here is a visual representation of these two concepts at work in a diamond with photographs taken through each instrument to demonstrate both brilliance and fire in diamonds:

Notice on the chart above that there is a diamond labeled “Ideal Cut” but there are two cuts better than it.  How can a cut be better than ideal?  Until the invention of these devices (the Firescope and the Dispersionscope) measurements from the exterior of a diamond were sufficient to grade the diamond’s cut.  Once people saw that it was OPTICAL symmetry that made a diamond right – and that correct proportions measured from the outside did not necessarily reflect on a diamond’s optical, three-dimensional symmetry – the concept of ideal cutting was immediately antiquated and relegated to a former era of gemology.  Much more about this later.

The diamonds we cut in my factory, Eightstar diamonds, were the best in the world because they were the first diamonds ever cut to actually hit the target that Tolkowsky sensed was correct, that actually demonstrated superiority in beauty because of superiority in optically aligned cutting.

When you look at the brilliance images above, you can see white light coming through the diamonds (indicating loss of brilliance) on the right, but not on the left.  When you look at the fire images above, you can see less and less fire emanating from the diamonds on the right as the optical symmetry of the diamonds deteriorates.

In my next blog post I will explain how we came to learn how to cut diamonds from a master cutter in Japan who turned around the failures of the first 500 years of diamond cutting to raise the cutting bar to the top of the scale, beyond actually.  Changes that have allowed for consumers of today to purchase diamonds in a market that has 10,000 times as many well cut diamonds as when my father purchased my mother’s diamond.

Diamonds Growing on My Family Tree

When my father got engaged in the 1920’s, he asked his father to find him a diamond because my grandfather was a New York diamond dealer.  Grandfather would be handed a diamond “wallet” by his broker, which fit comfortably into his valise containing the equivalent in today’s money of about a million dollars worth of diamonds.

Diamond boxes, or wallets, hold
diamond inventory in parcel papers

He did not have to invest any of his own money into the diamonds because they were property of the diamond firm Grandfather represented in those days and, thus, he received a percentage of every sale he made.  There were no security issues; he did not have to worry about thugs taking his diamond wallet – or worse, killing him -- as he would today.  He simply boarded a train in NYC headed toward St. Louis and stopped in every town along the way where jewelers and others in the trade purchased diamonds from him and paid cash.  It was easy for Grandfather to procure a diamond for Father when he proposed to Mother.



High quality diamond crystals showing characteristic
"trigons" on their crystal faces



I ended up with that diamond when my mother passed away.  Father said he paid 500 dollars for it back in the 20’s and it was sold to him as a “Flawless, blue-white, carat-and-a-quarter”

 My father died the year after my mother died, before I really understood the significance of a person’s roots and heritage, before I thought to really dig in depth for info about Grandfather and his highly esoteric diamond culture, his mysterious trade of black-robed Orthodox Jewish diamond brokers who shook hands, gave their Mazel and traded parcels of diamonds for promises of cash later.  The Mazel is part of a centuries-old ritual among diamond dealers mentioned in a quote in the New York Times in 1997 of Cecile Low:

“As the daughter of a diamond cleaver and trader, I learned the significance of a handshake as a child in Antwerp, Belgium. Diamond traders sealed deals and exchanged fortunes with a mere handshake and the Yiddish words ''mazel und broche'' -- ''luck and blessing.'' So much faith did, or still does, the handshake inspire, at least in the diamond trade.”

When a person buying a diamond – in the trade -- promises to purchase and pay and gets that legendary diamond-dealer handshake, it is because he or she has given his or her Mazel.  If the diamond is returned after giving a Mazel, you can be blacklisted right out of the trade.  Word spreads quicker than a forest fire if you break your Mazel.

HOW I GOT SUCKED INTO THE DIAMOND TRADE

One day in the 1970’s I decided to go to a jeweler with the diamond Grandfather secured for Father to see how much a flawless, blue-white diamond was worth.  He examined the stone in his microscope and determined it was NOT flawless.  Next he told me that the Federal Trade Commission had made it illegal to label a diamond blue-white unless it was examined by a recognized diamond-grading laboratory to be the top color grade.  Suddenly I felt an urge to have much more knowledge of diamonds than I had considering how easy it was to say just about anything about a diamond to a retail customer who was defenseless and untrained.

Mother separated from Father when I was pretty young.  She told me she was giving me her diamond and would keep it in a safe place for me since she no longer wished to wear it.  At that time, as near as I have been able to determine, the 500-dollar diamond had increased in value to about 3 thousand, a six-fold increase in 4 decades.  When I became a student of gemology in the late 70’s we began a serious period of inflation and its value soared to 20 thousand, 40 times what Father paid for it.

I sought to build a time-bridge between myself and Grandfather by studying diamonds and colored gemstones at the Gemological Institute of America which was located in Santa Monica then.  I wanted to understand how Mother’s diamond could have been labeled as the perfect color when it was not and the perfect clarity when it was not.  I learned that gemology was considered a trivial science until after the Second World War when it occurred to many jewelers that they were facing stiff competition from unscrupulous business counterparts who took full advantage of the esoteric nature of the diamond business and gave “optimistic” grades to diamonds that most people who were experts in the trade would disagree with, grades that made the unscrupulous ones much more profit.

INSTITUTIONS OF DIAMOND GRADING SPRANG UP TO PROTECT CONSUMERS

By the unscrupulous ones, the blue-white color grade was given to diamonds very generously.  TOO generously.  By those in the know, the perfectly white diamond was considered extremely rare, yet by the unscrupulous peddlers, all of their diamonds were blue-white.  It was an attempt to create some form of standardized diamond grading that would change diamonds from an obscure, unregulated business to a transparent one in which diamonds could be “certified” to be a certain color and clarity.  This was important because increases in color and clarity in diamonds brought disproportionately higher prices per unit.

Here is the GIA diamond COLOR GRADING scale now used all over the world:

The letter “D” was used as the top color grade leaving A, B and C for grading unpolished, rough diamonds. “Z” was used as the “bottom” of the color scale.  Diamonds that have more color than Z color diamonds are considered “Fancy Color” diamonds.  After Z, the price of diamonds begins to go up as there is more and more color in the stone.  D color is one of three grades of  “Colorlessness”.  This was one of the things that made me study gemology: that hard scientists have left such an imprint on the grading system that you can feel the presence of hair-splitting.  So, D, E and F color are the whitest colors diamonds come in, the rarest of the colors.  (My mother’s diamond turned out to be an F color.)

The purity of a diamond, also called the clarity of a diamond, is determined correctly only by experienced people who understand the nature of internal and external flaws in diamonds.  Gary Roskin, one of the most famous of America’s gemologists, was a diamond grader at the Gemological Institute of America when he wrote a book about diamond grading that included photographs of the internal characteristics of several diamonds, a book that can be used as a guide for determining the clarity grade of a diamond.  It is about how many inclusions, grain patterns, percussion marks, clouds, stress, crystals of other material (such as ruby), knotted internal crystals and other such things found in diamonds, how close to the edges (where prongs may crack a diamond in a weak area), and how visible they are under 10 power magnification. 

Here is the GIA CLARITY GRADING scale for diamonds:

If an expert using 10 power magnification cannot see ANYTHING within the diamond, it is labeled INTERNALLY FLAWLESS.  If this is true and there is NOTHING visible on the surface either, it is given the highest grade of all: FLAWLESS.  Below the flawless grade are VVS, VS, SI and I grades

--There is a VVS-1 and a VVS-2 (meaning two grades of very, very slightly imperfect)
--There is a VS-1 and a VS-2 (meaning two grades of very slightly imperfect)
--There is an SI-1 and an SI-2 (meaning two grades of slightly imperfect)
--There are three grades of Imperfect: I-1, I-2, and I-3

(My mother’s diamond is an F color, VS-1 clarity, not a flawless blue-white)

THE ADVENT OF SCIENCE

Until scientists got involved in diamond grading, it was not possible to make an accurate determination of a diamond’s grade.  With the presence of the gemological institutes there are standards for grading.  With the presence of the American Gem Society there is a profession to join that stands for ethics in the jewelry industry.

It would be, then, fair to say, that a person buying a diamond with a certificate from the most reputable grading labs can be confident of the quality analysis of 3 of the 4-c’s of diamond grading: 1) color graded against a standard color scale,  2) clarity graded against a standard of clarity-grading parameters and 3) weighed electronically to the thousandth of a carat. (A carat is a unit of weight used for gemstones of all kinds. It is derived from the ancient practice of putting stones on a scale and using carob beans as counterbalance to determine weight.)

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE QUALITY OF CUTTING

I said 3 of the 4.  Until recently, there was no quality analysis done on number 4, the CUTTING of a diamond.  Tiffany and Company stated in their brochures in the 1970’s that the most important C of the 4 (color, clarity, carat, cut), the one that made the most difference in the beauty of a diamond was the quality of its cutting. For the first 500 years of diamond cutting, the quality of cutting was largely overlooked in the diamond cutting industry in favor of using the cutter’s art to save weight.

Let’s look at the photo of the diamond crystals again:

The pieces of gem diamond rough in the photo are perfect specimens of octahedral crystallization (two pyramids: one on top and one on bottom).  Most diamond crystals do not form perfectly like these. To cut a diamond you would see in a ring from crystals like these, you would saw off about 2/3 of the top part to make a second diamond (known as a “toppie” in the diamond cutting trade) and cut the bottom piece into your main stone shedding 30 to 50 percent of the crystal weight depending on how close to “ideal” you want the cut to be.

Each diamond crystal costs thousands of dollars in the higher color and clarity grades. Every point of weight lost in cutting is profit disappearing into the air as diamond dust. (A “point” is 1/100 of a carat—like pennies to dollars are points to carats).  The diamond cutter in most factories is a slave to the profit-at-all-costs philosophy. The further you drift from ideal cutting standards, the more you sacrifice the beauty a diamond can give you.  The difference in the appearance of a poorly cut diamond and a well cut one can be observed from the other side of a restaurant.  Unless you can charge more for a well-cut diamond, the lost weight in ideal cutting prohibits the accounting divisions of large diamond cutting firms from allowing anything other than weight-saving techniques.

This is why it took a revolution in this kind of thinking to begin a movement that led to today’s diamonds which are infinitely superior in their cutting to the standard, even superior to those far above standard in the days I studied at the Gemological Institute of America.  I went far beyond just getting my “Sheepskin” from GIA.  I met the man in Tokyo who began the revolution with his Asian tenacity in pursuit of the truth and beauty. Mr. Tamura.



Mr. Tamura of Tokyo, inventor
of the world-famous
EightStar diamond



His story is an amazing one, one that involves me in the role of rocking the boat in the diamond industry of the Western world, one that allowed me to become one of the influential voices in the revolution.  I owned the diamond factory in the United States that the American Gem Society visited to “catch up” to the huge advances we made in the quality of diamond cutting.

I would like to share the story with you in increments. In my next blog I will take you deeper into the inner-workings of the diamond world and show you how I caused serious friction by challenging diamond cutters and dealers to concentrate on the quality of cutting so the consumer could get the benefit of a diamond’s beauty instead of a buying yet another testimonial to the importance of profit over beauty.

Fromage by any other Name is still Cheese

by Richard von Sternberg
September 2011

Like most people, I have consumed many types and textures of cheese throughout life.  Ubiquitous cheese: in spreads, dips, slices, blocks, bricks, melted, solid, soft, spreadable.  Cheeses come in numerous qualities from the pseudo cheeses like Velveeta, through packaged and sliced counterparts for sandwiches, graduating and metamorphosing through  several other levels all the way to specialty gourmet cheeses that come in prettier packages with stately names in French, German and Italian.  Or, could be from Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, California, any number of places.

The gourmet cheese sections of markets like Whole Foods and specialty cheese shops are chock-full of types and brands that represent centuries of refinement in the fine art of cheese making for the most discriminating of palates, cheeses made from goat milk, sheep milk, cow milk or from the milk of more exotic animals such as the yak.  Relative to the mundane cheeses that end up in sandwiches in school lunchboxes, the price tags on the exotic gourmet cheeses can curdle your gastric juices.

My parents loved the exotic cheeses.  I have an early childhood memory of what I hear people refer to as “stinky cheese”, an olfactory memory originating in our refrigerator where trouble was brewing after somebody had inadvertently left a package of cheese to “ripen” beyond most people’s definition of ripe.  What lay in store for me as a surprise for my sense of smell one day when I opened the refrigerator door disturbed the integrity of my respect for gourmet cheeses for years to come.  Decades would pass before I would consider trying anything stronger than Cheez Whiz.

One day on an along-the-country-roads drive to San Francisco through the hillocks and valleys of Western Marin County I stopped at a cheese factory I had passed numerous times known as Marin French Cheese, an out-of-the-way place that has the distinction of being America’s oldest cheese factory and an international gold medal winner in competitions held in Europe (“The gold medal was one of 13 awards the company won last year at the World Cheese Awards held in the United Kingdom.”-from Petaluma's Marin French Cheese Co. to be Sold by Jeff Kan Lee, Santa Rosa Press Democrat).

The tranquil lake at Marin French Cheese a few miles outside Petaluma in Hicks Valley

 

I tasted the first gourmet cheese there that melted in my mouth, a safe, subtly unobtrusive triple-cream Brie, a taste that diminished my phobic childhood memory of excessive pungency.  On my first cheese factory tour, there in Marin, I was olfactorily thrown back to my family’s refrigerator catastrophe as we passed the hanging Camembert cheeses and the cheese molds. 

It was a relief to discover that the poignant cheese truth floating in the air at Marin French Cheese was not a harbinger of a taste bud train wreck.  On the contrary: after spreading a little soft Brie onto a slice of the local sourdough French bread, I turned a corner and abandoned my fear of aged cheeses.

I was not on any mission or passionate pursuit of haut couture through the palate; I had simply been “opened” by my experience in Marin and no longer said “No, thank you” when offered stinky cheese.  One morning I took my family to breakfast at Willow Wood Market Café, very high on my list of favorite Sonoma County restaurants, a place where almost everything is organic, even the coffee, and made with care.  A menu selection called French Folded Eggs came with sourdough toast smothered in Cambazola cheese.

Wow!  What an eye-opener that was.  A combination of two cheese types, both of which are delicious:  “The cheese's name appears to be a portmanteau of Camembert and Gorgonzola, given that its flavor profile combines the moist, rich creaminess of Camembert with the sharpness of blue Gorgonzola.” (Wikipedia)  Soon I was spreading Cambazola on my own toast at home, wondering if there was another realm of cheese love or if I had actually found the upper limit of cheese heaven.

One day I was looking over the Cambazola selection at Oliver’s Market in Cotati, a very highly regarded local institution consisting of three markets with specialists in each of their departments who can answer questions about fine wines, fine cheeses, bakery goods, health and beauty products, and so on, stores that appeal to today’s Whole Foods kind of shopper.  I don’t like to be asked if I am finding everything OK or if I need help, have questions and so forth.  I know when I wonder something and know when I want to ask for assistance.  The lady in charge of the cheese section that day asked me if I needed help finding something in such a kind way that I asked her if there was a next step beyond Cambazola I should know about.

She grinned when I asked her, a grin that I could not interpret.  What she told me was that she had been on a voyage of discovery wondering that very thing when she found a specialty cheese from France called St. Agur.  Of course I could not go home without a package of it.  That was about 2 years and hundreds of dollars ago.  St. Agur is, at least for now, my absolute favorite cheese.  That kind woman in the cheese department of Oliver’s Market sanctified herself in my mind after opening the door to Saint Agur blue.

I became so enamored of this fine cheese that I wondered about its origins, its namesake, and imagined a story of some famous saint, so noble, that my favorite cheese was named after him deep in the heart of French history.  It was a surprise to discover that no such saint has ever set foot upon our planet and that, compared to well established cheese making institutions, St. Agur is a relative newcomer on the scene.

“Saint Agur Blue Cheese was introduced in 1988 by the French Cheese Company Bongrain. When I first saw the name I assumed the cheese was named after some famous Saint in ancient history. I thought it would be interesting to find out who Saint Agur was and what notable accomplishment he must have achieved to have such a lovely cheese named in his honor.

“The fact is, there is no Saint Agur and there never was. There isn’t even a town in France called Saint Agur. The name appears to be the result of a creative marketing department at Bongrain.” (From a web site called The Canada Cheese Man)

“The cows milk for Saint Agur comes from the village of Beauzac in central France. The milk is pasteurized. This is a rich cheese with 60% butterfat which qualifies it as a double-cream cheese. The blue comes from the fungi penicillium roqueforti which is the same fungi used in Stilton, Cambozola and Roquefort.  The Saint Agur has a short aging time of 60 days. The foil wrap prevents the cheese from becoming more blue.”

What they have created is a sensational blue cheese that spreads easily, tastes amazing, and has a much lower salt content which makes me want to give it an extra gold star.  Yum.  This is in a league of its own.

Learn more about this cheese if you like at the web site:

http://iledefrancecheese.com/index.php/St.-Agur/st-agur.html