Hi, I'm Steve Moriarty from Moriarty's Gem Art we represent ourselves online as
MoreGems.com - recently on one of the faceting forums a new cutter asked the
question as to whether we should polish the girdle or not
I personally don't currently polish girdles so I told him no but most
everybody else that absolutely polish girls I'm not sure I believe this
because the girdle is a reflecting surface that what light comes through
the crown of the stone I don't believe we'll ever reflect off the girdle facets
and end up coming out the top of the stone again is brilliance but I don't
know that for a fact I quit polishing girdles quite some time
ago because a lot of the stones I cut which we've include apatite's emeralds
sphalerites are a little more delicate and I've had some issues where the when
you go to polish the girdle which typically you do last I've had them chip
on me which means often recutting the whole stone so I quit polishing girdles
because I did not believe that it would have effect on the brilliance but I'm
going to find out for sure so what I've done so far is I took one
stone a citrine that didn't have a polished girdle and I repolished it and
try to take photos of it and before and after but it was very difficult to see
if there was a difference in brilliance so now I've decided to cut two identical
stones and then compare the brilliance and see if we can actually see the
difference so what I've chosen is some material zircon because it's a nice
brilliant stone and I'm going to cut my form of a modified round brilliant and
try and cut to the same size the exact same faceting and see if we can actually
see a difference in the brilliance and I made later do an oval also in citrine
just to try and really find out whether it does have an effect or not so polish
girdles are not we're going to try and find out now this is the first stone I'm
doing which is a zircon it's currently reddish brown but I'm going to heat it
to colorless and try and get them both to a near colorless state so it'll be
easier to see just what the brilliance is so we finished two pairs of identical
stones and it turned out to be something very difficult to prove whether fasted
girdle's or like polish journals or on polish girdles are more brilliant in the
case of the twos zircons we cut i've heated them they're white now but
unfortunately the stone with the polished girdle has a little bit of
haziness to it caused by clouds in the stone so it really wouldn't give an
accurate representation of the brilliance of a stone the citrine's are
much better they're clean very slight difference in color but both of them
have identical cuts and and we'll talk about more about the citrine's than the
zircons because they just don't apply so in the video the stone on the right is
the polished girdle the stone on the left is the on polished girdle the
videos are difficult to determine which one's more brilliant because there's
factors involved like where the lights were positioned and so it does make it
difficult but the biggest determination was I gave it to five different jewelers
had them walk around with them look at different lights and and try and
determine which was more brilliant and not a one could distinctly or definitely
say that one was more brilliant than the other I agreed with this and nobody knew
which one was the polished one and which one was the the unpolished girdle so in
my opinion looking at the stones you really can't see the difference between
the brilliance of a polished girdle and a non polished girdle this might be
verified more by cutting synthetics that are actually absolutely the same but I'm
pretty much done with this trying to determine which is more brilliant to me
there's so little difference in the brilliance that the extra time may not
be worth the effort because if I cut 500 stones in a year by not polishing the
girdles I could cut an extra 33 stones which even at 200 bucks is another six
seven thousand dollars so for me as a commercial cutter it may not make sense
to polish girdles although there are times that I do polish girdles when
they're a little thick or they're very long facets they tend to show up more
some colors show it more so I do polish some girdles but I'll continue to
generally not polish girdles just for the time involved for those of you who
are cutting for competition or really do not cut a lot of stones and you want the
stone to be perfect go ahead polish the girdle but don't expect that it's going
to be a much brighter stone because you did this so I want to thank you for
watching if there's any of you cutters out there that would like to go further
into this and cut your own stones I'd be very interesting I'd recommend cutting
some type of synthetic make sure you're on the same axis
it's very clean and send me your results so if you want more information you can
check us out online at moregems.com or Moriarty's Gem Art in Crown Point, IN.