Sterling silver ring with nest-style bezel and oval blue topaz

How it is made

The words of the trade, one by one, explained to those who do not know them.

01

Lost-wax casting

The model is built in wax, coated in refractory plaster and then heated until the wax runs out: what is left is a void of the exact shape, and into that void the molten silver is poured. To get the piece out the mold has to be broken, so every casting uses up both the wax and the mold, and the model you started from no longer exists. It is the way to get what the saw and the file would not — ribbons that overlap, undercuts, voids closed on every side — but if the metal does not reach the end of a thin branch the piece comes out incomplete, and it cannot be mended: it is melted down and you start again from the wax.

02

Nest setting

The setting is not a ring of metal closed around the stone: it is a low cup in the shape of a leaf, and over it run round silver wires that cross and wind like the twigs of a nest. The stone does not rest on the bottom — it is raised on eight claws, two by two, and beneath it there is air. The bottom of the cup is therefore visible all around the gem, and it is the part that forgives least: it stays matt and in full view, so every mark from a file or a slipped tool stays on it, and to take one out you would have to remove metal exactly where the cup is thinnest.

03

Open, adjustable shank

The circle is not closed: the two ends of the band overlap at the side and slide over one another, so the ring opens out or closes up on the finger without going back to the studio. That convenience has a precise limit: bent silver work-hardens, that is, it becomes hard exactly where it has worked, and past a certain number of openings it cracks instead of giving. You settle it with your fingers once, on the right finger, and from then on you leave it alone.

04

Hammering

The shank is beaten with a hammer until the surface takes on an irregular texture. No blow is the same as the one before it, so no ring is the same as another.

05

Blue topaz

Topaz is an aluminum silicate, and in nature it is almost always colorless. The blue seen in jewelry almost always comes from a treatment: the colorless rough is irradiated and then heated, and the color that comes out is stable and does not fade. Blue topaz of natural origin does exist, but it is rare and usually very pale — on a saturated blue stone, treatment is therefore the rule and not the exception, and it is a declared and accepted practice in the gem trade. For whoever does the setting something else counts: topaz cleaves along a clean plane, parallel to the base. A knock given in the wrong direction does not chip a corner, it opens the stone in two — that is why it is held on claws that take it around the edge and leave it free, and why on a topaz already in its seat a bezel is not pushed over.