Faceting

It's not a silly question at all 😄 faceting is one of those rare hobbies to stumble across in the real world.

For perspective, this stone took me about 8 hours to cut, so this little comment probably makes the execution sound simpler than it is. Most faceters use a diagram to cut which tells them the precise angle as well as location on the the stone to cut that angle.

We glue our uncut stone to a stick, called a "dop", to attach it to our angle machine.

We have spinning discs, called "laps" that are basically like sandpaper but made with diamonds instead of sand. When we cut the stone we start at very low grit laps which will cut fast but leave behind deep, rough scratches, then we progress to finer and finer grit laps until the diamond scratches are so microscopic that to a 10x magnification the stone still looks flawlessly polished.

We do this grinding technique to one half of the stone at a time, typically the pavilion (the backside of the gem) first and then the crown (top half) second.

Crylos has actually posted a much more in depth how-to earlier in this community if you want to drive deeper into the rabbit hole of faceting.

In this stone, the frosted facets are actually un-polished areas of the stone, so the snowflake you see is actually very fine scratches that aren't bouncing light correctly, creating the "line" appearance. There's multiple facets on the crown, so it is bouncing the "line" appearance through different angles, making it look way more complex than it actually is.

Here's a photo of the frosting lines on the pavilion. Deceptively simple compared to what you see on the final product, isn't it? 🤭