Girl's Best Friend Goes High-Tech
Gary Gordon no longer has to deal with diamonds in the rough.
The Oklahoma City diamond dealer recently cut a deal to become the only diamond retailer in the country to get a new high-tech machine that takes the human out of grading diamonds. The machine, called a BrillianceScope Analyzer, assigns numeric values to a diamond's brilliance and sparkle.
"It used to be that you'd hold a diamond up and tell the customer its color and its clarity, and then you'd ooh and aah about how beautiful it was," the third-generation owner of Samuel Gordon Jewelers said. "Now we have a machine that can quantitatively grade that. This is the closest any human can get to where beauty can be rated."
Some people might argue beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Gordon's industry, however, profits from exactly that perspective. Gordon expects the BrillianceScope to improve customers' knowledge, and in turn, improve his profits.
GemEx Systems, Inc., based in Mequon, Wis., developed the machine. Company Vice President Bob DuBois explained the BrillianceScope measures the refracted light, or brilliance, of a diamond. It is derived from spectrophotometer technology.
A diamond is cut so light enters the stone through its crown, bounces around inside and exits again in a refracted spectrum, the colors of the rainbow. With a fixed cost for a diamond in the rough, producers want to save as much of the stone as possible, DuBois said. But those natural shapes and manmade cuts also determine how much light any particular diamond piece will reveal. Gemcutters try to maximize that potential.
A diamond held perfectly still in relation to a light source and an eye will not sparkle; it produces a static reflection and refraction pattern, which the machine measures. By setting the spectrophotometer at specific focal points, the computer produces a string of numbers and letters that will mean the same thing to every jeweler and customer, the men said.
"I've found out that the more our customers are educated, the better they understand what they're buying.the bottom line is our cash register rings more frequently," Gordon said.
DuBois' company chose Samuel Gordon Jewelers after balancing factors including inventory - about 2,500 unset diamonds, sales volume, customer base and industry recognition.
GemEx is at the forefront of light-return research with the BrillianceScope, said Robert Weldon, a gemologist for the industry magazine Professional Jeweler.
And Gary Gordon, said Editor in Chief Peggy Jo Donahue, is definitely one of those people who play a leadership role in the industry.
"He's known for a lot of the innovative things he's done," Donahue said. The store also is what DuBois called a "destination" site, with a customer base slightly different from comparison mall shoppers.
GemEx's marketing model is to sell the BrillianceScope directly to wholesalers, not retailers. So Samuel Gordon Jewelers will be one of a few retailers nationwide to have direct access to the machine.
Gordon said the machine would cost more than $50,000 to buy, but GemEx offered it for a few monthly payments of about $6,000 in administrative costs.
"A pretty modest amount of money," he said. "They're practically giving us a grant to introduce it to the public. The companies may work out a purchase deal later."
DuBois' company's success depends on full disclosure and consumer trust, he said.
Once wholesalers begin using GemEx machines to verify standards, retailers will be able to buy diamonds over the Internet with more faith in the product, DuBois proposed. Human error and judgment calls will be reduced, he said.
Donahue said the jewelry industry is still debating whether a machine can fully measure diamond quality by itself, as opposed to a trained human eye.
"The consensus of the wise people is that you really have to do both," she said. "It's just that these machines give consumers the reassurance of a less subjective system."
An informal survey of other metro area jewelers found no other spectrophotometers on hand, but a lot of other related equipment instead.
B.C. Clark Jewelers does not have a spectrophotometer at its downtown lab, said Coleman Clark, director of marketing. Clark's lab does have a spectroscope for stone identification, however, and a lot of other gem technology, he said.
"There's more and more instruments coming out, as there always have been," Clark said. "As they get more sophisticated, one thing we try not to let our customers forget is how the diamond looks to the eye. How beautiful is it? That's more important than anything any instrument can tell you."
Most quality jeweler labs have high-tech equipment, as required by the American Gem Society for certification, he said - such as a refractometer, for example, which measures a stone's refraction index.
"But sometimes it can be over-analyzed and over-technicalized a little bit," Clark said. "So there's a risk of getting too deep into the technical aspect of it."
"There's more and more instruments coming out, as there always have been. As they get more sophisticated, one thing we try not to let our customers forget is how the diamond looks to the eye. How beautiful is it? That's more important than anything any instrument can tell you."
Coleman Clark, director of marketing, B.C. Clark Jewelers