When Lauren Schmeer, a strategy adviser in New York City, thought her old partner was about to ask the question, she started to drop hints about the stone she wanted for her engagement ring. “Not a diamond,” she remembered. “And I wanted something that had a little color. I wanted to be able to look at it and see something new and different every time. “
Her soon fiancé, Dean Coffin, started working with Mociun, a jeweler brand in Brooklyn, and almost immediately on the upper notch facets, a gemstone cutter that also sells stones, as the right source for such a specific item. After investigating a few options, Mr. Coffin an elongated 3.95-carat blue-green Montana Sapphire with a somewhat off-cilia form.
Mrs. Schneer’s response to the minimalist, East-West-oriented Solitaire that she received in November? “It was perfect,” she said.
Jean-noted Soni founded Top Notch in 2009 and founded his one-man company on distinctive cuts for colored gems. He did not want to produce known forms, such as round, pillow or marquise, with the prescribed number of facets – an approach that he said he is putting “a false ideal of perfect angle” on a jewel. Instead, he said that he gives every stone a form that “maintains the integrity of the crystal.”
When Mr. Soni, 42, is finished with a jewel, it has the standard elements such as a flat table, the term for the upper facet of the stone and a tapered pavilion, the bottom half of the stone. But the gems are almost always asymmetrical and idiosyncratic.
He noticed that process, limited his output seriously. For example, in 2024 he only cut 61 precious stones; His career production is 1,241 from this month.
Mr. Soni’s work is “unconventional, even avant-garde,” wrote Rebecca Boyajian-Pecnik, the director of market development at the Gemological Institute of America, in an e-mail. “He follows the shape and contours of the gem instead of cutting a calibrated shape.”
Road to stones until only a fraction remains is common in his trade, but Mr. Soni had a revelation in 2012 that things could be different.
He once cut a Dravite with 20 carat, a champagne-colored tourmaline, until only four carats left, that “for a gemstone cutter-that is a fantastic yield,” he said. Yet he felt that something was wrong with throwing away so much of the original stone and makes it his practice to try to cut away as little as possible.
“We’re talking about really rare jewelry materials,” he said. “The last thing I want to do is pay the weight or size of something scarce because my ego wants the table and culet in a certain place or size.” (A Culet is a small, flat facet on the lower point of a gem.)
The genuine quality of a stone is an important element of his appeal to Mr. Soni. “A part of what makes it beautiful is the fact that it was of course created this way,” he said. So none of the sapphires, grenades and spins that are often seen in his precious stone portfolio are treated; Heating and radiation are only two of the treatments that the jewelry industry often uses to improve the color or durability of a jewel.
Mr. Soni is almost completely autodidactic. A resident of New Jersey, he was a teenager when he apprentices in local piercing studios. Processing steel for the barbell and trapped bead rings that they often use, taught him that he was “mechanically inclined,” he said.
In 2005, when Mr. Soni moved to Northern California, he followed a class to learn the casting of lost wax, the process of creating a jewelry form based on a laundry hook. The first assignment was the cutting and polishing of a cabochon, a jewel with a smooth, undamaged surface – and his fascination for cutting precious stones started there.
“It touched all the things in my head that I liked making body jewelry,” he said. “I was obsessed with.”
He started to teach himself how to cut faceted stones, learned by trial and error and with the help of specialists such as Jeff Graham, a well-known cutter in Arizona who died in 2009. A daily job at an animal hospital covered for living and allows him to buy equipment, all-grinding, forches, Forches connections.
“All in all,” he said recently, “it took about two years to collect everything I needed to start.”
In 2012 he founded a top facet account on Instagram. It became a kind of billboard for his work and revealed influences such as the art of Alexander Calder, the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and Art Nouveau style. “I have done a lot of work to look at proportion and relationship and form,” he said.
Mr. Soni’s clientele is varied, including couples such as Mrs. Schmeer and Mr. Coffin; Stone collectors who have no plans to mount their gems; And jewelry designers with approaches that are as rigorous as those of Mr. Soni, including Alice Cicolini and Otto Jakob.
Mr Jakob, who lives in Karlsruhe, Germany, bought a blue spider and grenades in different colors of Mr. Soni.
“There is a kind of lighting and vibration that you see in his work, and that is really the beautiful one,” said Mr. Jakob, who has experience with jewel. “You can’t learn it. Or you have it, or you never do that. “
Yet Mr. Soni the top faceting as’ three different companies. It is cutting, buying and selling. “He acquires stones through a network of dealers, but has traveled to destinations, including Nigeria and Sri Lanka to buy precious stones.
And he is picky about who she buys, so he sells them himself, usually during personal appointments in New York and London. “Part of the beauty is sitting with people and discussing and talking,” he said. “I want the integrity of the company in a certain way.”
To this end, he refuses to sell precious stones to new customers via Instagram (or to reveal prices via direct message, in that regard). But his offer starts at $ 3,000 for a pastel grenade, for example, slightly less than two carat “for time and material,” he said to more than $ 250,000 for rarity such as a 16.5-carat sapphire from Madagascar.
With regard to the future, Mr. Soni is not considering hiring a student. “I should give up all my secrets to someone, and that is difficult,” he said. But if his 13-year-old son Henri, who often accompanies him on his travels, continues to show interest in the company, that can change.
In the meantime, cutting stones represents just as much of a solo passion project for Mr. Soni as a profession: “If I was broke, I would still polish stones for fun.”
