Here’s a collection of Cabochon Star Sapphires & Sapphires without stars!

This year is a year where the trend of having 2 different looking wedding bands is popular!

For this couple, the man wanted something beautiful yet manly and conservative. The lady wanted something “bling” and elegant.

We went for this design as the men’s ring was simple yet the 0.111ct diamond added something special. We went for a half eternity(bling factor), shared claw setting so that the diamonds look close together. We agreed that 0.04ct diamonds were the right choice as they were big enough to be seen yet small enough to be elegant.

We chose a comfort fit (slight bevel inside the ring) to give it a more comfortable feel. I also reccomended them to make the ring slightly thinner at the bottom so that the rings won’t get in the way when they hold each others’ hands or when holding something.

We set the rings in 18k white gold.

This is one of my favourite wedding bands! It took alot of work but the end product was fabulous! My client wanted to make a wedding band to suprise his wife for their anniversary, so he thought about an idea of putting all the birthstones of everyone in the family.

The 2 diamonds represent his wife & himself, whilst the other gemstones (Garnet, Alexandrite, Blue Zircon, Peridot) represented each of their children.

I went through my stock to find the most matching and the best quality of these stones. I had to re-cut the Blue Zircon(from 0.20+ct to 0.15ct) & peridot (from 1.5ct+ to 0.17ct) to match sure that they can fit into a half-eternity ring setting.

As all the rings that his wife owns are platinum, I suggested to do this in platinum to avoid any differentiation of colour(white gold will get scratched and lose its white rhodium coating to reveal a slight tinted yellow colour).

So here it is, a one of a kind wedding band

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Here’s a collection of some of our pearls.

3 beautiful sapphires!

HRDAntwerp is coming to Singapore once again at the end of this month. They would be holding their Certified Diamond Grader Program and a workshop on Diamond Treatments & Fancy Coloured Diamonds! I personally went for the courses last year and I learnt alot from it.

I was trained under the GIA diamond grading system and learning the HRDAntwerp way of grading broaden my perspective on how I grade diamonds. The HRDAntwerp method is very systematic and easy to understand. The trainer, Mr Wouter Vansteelant was very clear and experienced.

I also attended the 2 day workshop on diamond treatments & fancy coloured diamonds! It was a great eye opener! I really liked the section on Fancy Coloured Diamonds! This was one of the reasons why I am dealing with Fancy Coloured Diamonds now.

This year, Far East Gemological Institute has managed to bring HRDAntwerp back to Singapore! Cost of the diploma course is SGD$3200 and the workshop is only SGD$1000.

I’m making a mention of this course as it benefited me tremendously.

For more information, please visit http://www.gem.com.sg/ins/edudiamond.php

Fancy coloured diamonds are very rare and very beautiful! They come in all sorts of colours such as yellow, champagne, cognac, green, pink, blue, red, violet, grey, black, orange, etc. Their colour is graded with a different scale unlike the D-Z for white colourless diamonds.

When describing the colour, there you have to take in consideration the strength of the colour, followed by the secondary colour and lastly the primary colour, e.g. Fancy Vivid Brownish Yellow.

Strength of colour is graded by the GIA  such as Fancy Light, Fancy, Fancy Intense, Fancy Deep, Fancy Vivid or Fancy Dark, which describes the combined effect of tone and saturation. To read more about this you can go to http://www.gia.edu/lab-reports-services/diamonds/diamond-reports/index.html.