About Anthony
I’ve had a life-long interest in rocks, minerals and gems. It all started at a very young age, with hunting for agates on the beaches of the Pacific coast.
Lapidary equipment was always present around my childhood home, and I developed a natural interest in it. I first became hooked after seeing a rock saw cut various rocks into slices, so I could see what was inside. I then began to cut cabochons and other shapes out of various stones and polish them.
As I grew, so did my interests in everything about rocks and gems. I read through every mineral and gem book I could find, and experimented with different lapidary materials and techniques.
When I learned about the art of faceting, I became determined to facet gems one day. In my early teen years, I got my first summer job and worked hard to save up for a faceting machine and all the various tools and accessories needed. I eventually was able to purchase a machine in early 1998. I was immediately hooked and would spend hours each day working at the machine.
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I am entirely self-taught. I read many books on faceting and also as much as I could find online. I experimented with every technique and material I could manage. Eventually, I developed the techniques to successfully cut and put an excellent polish on virtually any type of gem. The stones that always stood out as my favorites were sapphire, garnet and spinel, though I do appreciate a wide range of gem materials.
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I studied my second major interest in college: Botany. A few years later, I decided to attend GIA’s Carlsbad, California campus in 2002 to earn my Graduate Gemologist diploma.
After graduating, I worked as a diamond grader in GIA’s Gem Trade Lab in Carlsbad. I then moved to the Pacific Northwest, where I continued to work as a laboratory gemologist and appraiser at private laboratories for about a decade. During this time I saw many thousands of diamonds and gems, and developed a deep connection with the nuances of diamond and colored gem cutting. It perplexed me how much attention was paid to the quality of the cutting for diamonds, but how very little regard there was for the cut quality of colored gems-- in fact, most of them are cut singly to weigh as much as possible. Being cut only to maximize weight is seen as a major detraction to diamonds, so why not colored gems?
I felt a sense that this needed to change. I searched through as much diamond cut knowledge as I could find, and learned that there is a basic sense of aesthetics in diamond cutting that is not present with colored gems. I spent many hours developing diamond cut aesthetics for colored gems, and also refining my own precision cutting techniques. I realized that the same aesthetic principles for ideal and premium cut diamonds can also be applied to colored gems when adapted to their various optical qualities.
Being a gemologist trained to the extremely tight tolerances for premium diamond cuts, I set out on a mission to develop Ideal “Hearts and Arrows” round designs for non-diamond materials. I developed my first Ideal Cut round designs in late 2006, cutting the first “Hearts and Arrows” precision cut sapphire in early 2007. To my knowledge, no one else in the world had developed such a cut for anything but diamond at this point in history.
It’s always been my goal to blend precision cutting with aesthetics to create gems that are cut first and foremost for beauty. I won’t sacrifice the potential of a gem just to make it weigh more.
All the designs of my gems are hand crafted by me through a very careful process. Reflecting back on my longtime interest in botany, my cut designs share a floral theme. I don’t use anyone else’s designs and I don’t sell any gems not cut in-house.
