Cora Sheibani is somewhere up in the hills of Central Java, Indonesia, when she speaks to me, wearing a necklace made of huge shells that she found on the beach earlier in her vacation.
“Most people collect the perfect shells, but it’s the imperfect ones that are best for making jewelry,” she tells me as I admire the way the pastel forms sit just so. In their imperfection, her jeweler’s eye found the precision necessary to create harmony.
Precision is also central to her new one-of-a-kind collection, Facets & Form, which centers on the ways different diamond cuts can play with light. Rather than a commodity, she sees gems as integral to her craft, as an entry point into a world that marries the multiple passions that have inspired her since she was small. Handcrafting initially drew her to jewelry; she made bracelets as a child and spent the first money she earned on a Greco-Roman ring. Later, her interests in art, history and science converged in the world of gems.
“If we don’t think of diamonds as pieces of design in their own right — as wonders of nature — then there’s no point,” she declares. Although the collection includes other gems, Sheibani has the spotlight firmly trained on this eternal stone.
One shape, lots of cuts
Facets & Form explores the history of gem-cutting, with help from Yoram Finkelstein of Gem Concepts, whom she describes as a “diamond designer” because of his lapidary precision. For Sheibani, he has recreated old cuts using modern technology.
“Working with the different facets of the stones is new for me,” she says. “The way light falls through diamonds is very special. For colored stones, it’s different, which is why cut is so much more important for diamonds. For me, the design of the diamond is more important than the final carat weight. That’s where its value lies.”
The inspiration for the collection came when a client asked her to design an eternity ring. The client deliberated among different cuts, eventually opting for baguette diamonds. Sheibani made several prototypes, but the customer ultimately left happy with new frames for her existing ring instead. The experience sparked an idea for a mixed-cut diamond ring using stones of the same shape.
“The oldest cut we have is square — and even among the main square cuts, we have so many,” Sheibani explains. “Today…90% [of square diamonds are] step-cut or princess. Through the Time-Line ring [in the new collection], we’re telling the story of 12 square cuts.”
Like the earrings, brooches and other jewels in the Facets & Form line, the ring allows the wearer to explore the light that different diamond cuts create.
“To my knowledge, this is the first time anyone has used more than two or three different cuts of the same shape” in a single jewel, says the designer.
Puzzles to solve
The crafting process was not without its challenges. During production in Switzerland, Sheibani recalls, “we had to be mindful of how the stones were set. Channel-setting would have made them all look rectangular, so we had to add metal in between each pair of stones.”
Pricing was also a consideration. To keep costs down, she bought high-end rough stones from dealers in small quantities and had them custom-cut, rather than buying polished ones.
Sheibani is known for her inventive product launches, which have included coloring books and cookbooks that highlight her jewelry. The first pieces from Facets & Form will be on show in September, and a puzzle book is in the works to go with the collection.
“People don’t really want a catalog, so I thought, let’s tell this story through puzzles and crosswords, to teach them about the history of cuts,” she relates.
The glittering world of precision-cut diamonds may seem light-years away from those imperfect, beautiful shells on an Indonesian beach, but maybe they’re not so far apart after all.
Image: Jewelry designer Cora Sheibani. (Cora Sheibani)
This article is from the October-November 2024 issue of Rapaport Magazine. View other articles here.
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