When Lauren Schmeer, a strategy consultant in New York City, thought her longtime partner was about to pop the question, she started dropping hints about the stone she wanted for her engagement ring. “‘Not a diamond’,” she recalled saying. “And I wanted something that had a little bit of color to it. I wanted to be able to look into it and see something new and different each time.”
Her soon-to-be fiancé, Dean Coffin, began working with Mociun, a jewelry brand in Brooklyn, and almost immediately zeroed in on Top Notch Faceting, a gem cutter that also sells stones, as the right source for such a specific item. After examining a few options, Mr. Coffin chose a elongated 3.95-carat blue-green Montana sapphire with a slightly off-kilter shape.
Ms. Schneer’s reaction to the minimalist, east-west oriented solitaire she received in November? “It was perfect,” she said.
Jean-Noel Soni founded Top Notch in 2009, focusing his one-man business on distinctive cuts for colored gemstones. He didn’t want to produce familiar shapes such as round, cushion or marquise, with the prescribed numbers of facets — an approach that he said imposes “some false ideal of perfect angle” onto a gem. Instead, he said he gives each stone a form that “maintains the crystal’s integrity.”
When Mr. Soni, 42, is finished with a jewel, it does have standard elements such as a flat table, the term for the stone’s top facet, and a tapered pavilion, the bottom half of the stone. But the gems are almost always asymmetrical and idiosyncratic.
That process, he noted, severely limits his output. In 2024, for example, he cut just 61 gems; his career output, as of this month, is 1,241.
Mr. Soni’s work is “unconventional, even avant-garde,” Rebecca Boyajian-Pecnik, the director of market development at the Gemological Institute of America, wrote in an email. “He follows the shape and contours of the gem rather than cutting to a calibrated form.”
Whittling away at stones until only a fraction remains is common practice in his trade, but Mr. Soni had a revelation in 2012 that things could be different.
He once cut a 20-carat dravite, a champagne-colored tourmaline, until only four carats remained, which “for a gem cutter — that’s a fantastic yield,” he said. Still, he felt there was something wrong with discarding that much of the original stone and makes it his practice to try to cut away as little as possible.
“We are speaking about truly rare jewel materials,” he said. “The last thing I want to do is butcher the weight or size of something scarce because my ego wants the table and culet in a certain spot or size.” (A culet is a small, flat facet at the bottom tip of a gem.)
A stone’s unadulterated quality is a major element of its appeal to Mr. Soni. “Part of what makes it beautiful is the fact that it’s naturally created this way,” he said. So none of the sapphires, garnets and spinels frequently seen in his gem portfolio are treated; heating and irradiation are just two of the treatments that the jewelry industry often uses to improve the color or durability of a gem.
Mr. Soni is almost entirely self taught. A native of New Jersey, he was a teenager when he apprenticed in local piercing studios. Machining steel for the barbell and captive bead rings that they commonly use taught him he was “mechanically inclined,” he said.
In 2005, when Mr. Soni moved to Northern California, he took a class to learn lost-wax casting, the process of creating a jewelry mold based on a wax carving. The first assignment was cutting and polishing a cabochon, a gem with a smooth, unfaceted surface — and his fascination with cutting gems began there.
“It ticked all the things in my head that I liked about making body jewelry,” he said. “I was obsessed.”
He began teaching himself how to cut faceted stones, learning through trial and error and with help from specialists such as Jeff Graham, a well-known cutter in Arizona who died in 2009. A day job at an animal hospital covered living expenses and allowed him to buy equipment piece by piece — grinding tools, polishing compounds, torches.
“All in all,” he said recently, “it took a total of about two years to collect everything I needed to start.”
He established a Top Notch Faceting account on Instagram in 2012. It became a kind of billboard for his work, revealing influences like the art of Alexander Calder, the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and Art Nouveau style. “I put a lot of work into looking at ratio and proportion and form,” he said.
Mr. Soni’s clientele is varied, including couples like Ms. Schmeer and Mr. Coffin; stone collectors who have no plans to mount their gems; and jewelry designers with approaches as rigorous as Mr. Soni’s own, including Alice Cicolini and Otto Jakob.
Mr. Jakob, who lives in Karlsruhe, Germany, has bought a blue spinel and garnets in a variety of colors from Mr. Soni.
“There’s a kind of illumination and vibration you see in his work, and that’s really the wonderful thing,” said Mr. Jakob, who himself has experience in gem cutting. “You can’t learn it. Either you have it, or you never will.”
Yet Mr. Soni views Top Notch Faceting as “three different businesses. It’s cutting, buying and selling.” He acquires stones through a network of dealers, but has traveled to destinations including Nigeria and Sri Lanka to buy gems.
And he is choosy about who buys them, so he sells them himself, mostly during personal appointments in New York and London. “Part of the beauty of this is sitting with people and discussing and talking,” he said. “I want the integrity of the business to be a certain way.”
To that end, he refuses to sell gems to new clients via Instagram (or to disclose prices through direct message, for that matter). But his offerings start at $3,000 for, say, a pastel garnet slightly less than two carats — “for time and material,” he said — to more than $250,000 for rarities such as a 16.5-carat sapphire from Madagascar.
As for the future, Mr. Soni isn’t contemplating taking on an apprentice. “I’d have to give up all my secrets to somebody, and that’s tricky,” he said. But if his 13-year-old son Henri, who often accompanies him on his travels, continues to show interest in the business, that might change.
In the meantime, cutting stones represents as much of a solo passion project for Mr. Soni as it does a profession: “If I was broke, I’d still be polishing stones for fun.”
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