I was hoping to buy a diamond ring from Blue Nile and do a price match with a vendor such as Calavera or Aurelinne to make the price a bit more reasonable, but I've had some trouble dealing with their customer support. I was initially planning to look up the Blue Nile report IDs on these other websites to find the same gem, but while Blue Nile includes the reports for their gems, they redact the actual report ID. The AI chatbot on the website claims that this is for "security reasons," which doesn't really make any sense to me, especially since other websites seem to have no problem disclosing report IDs.

Regardless, I found a diamond on Calavera with all the same characteristics as the diamond I was interested in and submitted a price match request. They didn't get back to me for about a week and when I reached out again to check on the status of the price match, the representative told me that my price match was never submitted. This new representative acted very weird in the chat about my price match with Calavera, saying they didn't think it would be accepted but not telling me why (at first, they tried to say that the gem wasn't similar enough to theirs, but they backed off when I quoted the specs). When I heard back about the decision, they said that they could not honor the price match, but would offer a $300 discount, which I declined (the gem I found on Calavera was about $2k less than the one on Blue Nile). They did not say why they were not able to honor the price match, so I assume that they simply didn't want to sell me the diamond for that much less than the listed price.

After all of this, I looked on Reddit and found a lot of bad experiences with Blue Nile's customer support during returns/refunds and one post that mentioned that Blue Nile pretends to be customers on Reddit. All of this combined with my experience has given me a bad/shady feeling about the company that I just wanted to share here.

I also just noticed that blue Nile definitely sold my email address to some sketchy people. I just got an email to the email alias I only gave out to Blue Nile that appears to be some kind of ad or scam. Most of the body of the email is blocked by my email client.

Tried to make a similar post on Reddit for more visibility but my posts kept getting deleted by Reddit/mods.

This is a crappy 3D video model but you can get the idea. I pretty much discovered this chain style and want to partner up with anyone who has a jeweler's mindset and wants to develop this link style.

I prefer not to shop at a big retailer like kay, that just gives me the ick

Hello 👋 I have to make a gift for my girlfriend and I know she would love a necklace. I found this https://www.stonebystone.pt/en/silver/necklace/leaf-necklace_p775.html?id=238&cat=580&pc=6 and I am sure she likes it. However, I would like to see other options.

edit: grammar

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/296808

First post!

This is the first in a series of posts that show how I cut gemstones.

Also come check out and ask questions in faceting.

This is the first post in a series that will try and go into detail around how I cut stones.

In general you don't start with a design you start with the stone. I chose a stone that was large enough that it would be easy to take pictures of the details as I cut. For this I chose this piece of clear Topaz. Many people know Topaz in a variety of blue hues, but in reality most of those blues are not natural. To make a stone blue, the stone is irradiated which turns it brown. Then the stone is heated to 500 degrees or higher for a period of time which then turns the stone blue. The actual hue of blue depends on the amount of time the stone was irradiated and/or heated.

This particular stone has a piece off to the side that is full of internal cracks and inclusions. Ignoring that portion, there are additional issues with the stone on two corners. In looking at the stone as a whole, it looks like I can get two rounds out of the stone by making the following cuts.

To make these cuts I'll use a saw blade attachment on my machine:

First cut off the side piece:

Next cut it in sort of half, and you end up with these pieces:

The upper right and bottom are the two pieces that can be cut. The upper left is unusable due to the internal issues it has.

The next step is to hand rough in one of the two stones into a cylinder.

Which now looks like this:

Finally, I glue the stone to a dop, and it's ready to be put in the cutting head.

Now that I have the stone roughed in, and on a dop, what kind of design am I going to cut? I chose the following design I made a while back but never cut which I call 'spinning top'.

It's render from the cad software I use looks like this if you are looking straight down into the stone.

Well, we shall see what it really looks like when we are done!

I'll continue the process in the next post.

I cut this stone for a commission for a co-worker of mine. Pear cuts are a pain to get fully symmetrical, but this one turned out very nice.

I've started a community around faceting where I'm starting to go through the process of how I cut stones. Come join!