Measuring Beauty
If Randy Wagner has his way, the four Cs may soon give way to a new definition of fire, brilliance and scintillation.
The Brilliancescope in action: Randy Wagner and Kurt Shoeckert, co-founders of GemEx systems, measure the light return on a diamond with their BrillianceScope machine. The machine measures the elements that make up a diamond’s beauty: white light, coloured light and sparkle.
For years the icehouse sat on the street corner of nearly every neigh-bourhood. It provided the only form of refrigeration: old fashioned natural ice. People would to go the icehouse, and head home with a hunk of frozen water to put in their home iceboxes and keep milk and butter cool. Eventually, with progress in technology, came the refrigerator. Powered by electricity, the home refrigerator could do the same job as the icebox – only for less money, greater efficiency and a lot more convenience. But with the advent of the refrigerator also came the decline of icehouses. The small operations soon closed as demand for a steady supply of fresh ice dried up. Every home soon had a fridge; the refrigerator drove the revolution of the ice industry. "We’re the refrigerator,” Randy Wagner says.
Wagner is co-founder and president of GemEx Systems. At six feet tall, slightly graying curly hair and a thick moustache, Randy Wagner looks like he’d be more comfortable coaching a kid’s soccer game than turning an industry inside out. But that’s exactly what he’s trying to do. Wagner has an invention that he thinks will revolutionize the diamond industry – much in the same way the refrigerator reshaped the ice industry.
Diamonds are traditionally measured using the four Cs – colour, cut, clarity and carat – which are used in assigning a value to the quality and rarity of a diamond. The clearer the colour, more exact the cut, less inclusions and larger the stone, the higher the quality of the diamond. It’s a decades-old formula.
Wagner’s machine is known as the BrillianceScope. It measures the amount of light a diamond returns. Light return is the element responsible for giving a diamond its beauty. So in other words, Wagner’s machine is a method for measuring the beauty of a diamond. Instead of using the four Cs, the BrillianceScope measures and assigns values to the return of white light (brilliance), coloured light (fire) and sparkle (scintillation) of a diamond. Where the four Cs measure the elements that theoretically should make a diamond beautiful, the BrillianceScope measures the results of the theory in determining how beautiful a diamond actually is. It’s a system that Wagner says emphasizes a diamond’s beauty over its technical specifications.
But refrigeration provides a service that improves the quality of people’s lives. People don’t need diamonds to improve their quality of life. So is GemEx, and its BrillianceScope, really necessary? Wagner’s technology, on the surface, seems only to offer yet another way of quantifying the desirability of one dia-mond over another; another certification in a system already rife with certifications. Companies like Gemological Institute of American, American Gemological Society, European Gemological Laboratories and International Gemological Institute (among others) already offer certificates guaranteeing their measurements of the traditional four Cs.
So what then is the use of Wagner’s system? It’s not offering a new technology to fill a void – systems are already in place to measure the desirability of a diamond. And it isn't improving people’s quality of life, as the refrigerator did. Will GemEx be the great revolutionizer that Wagner says, bringing the industry into "a new way of doing things, and a new way of thinking?” Actually, it just might.
When Randy Wagner graduated from Marquette University, in his home state of Wisconsin, working in the diamond industry was pretty much the last thing he thought he’d do. Instead, his career path took him to a job with the U.S. Navy as a civilian engineer designing weather satellite receiving systems for the Navy to use at sea.
After five years of working for Uncle Sam, Wagner returned home to Wisconsin to work for a small medical electronics company. He went from designing satellite receiving systems to developing heart and brain monitors.
It was through an acquaintance at his local Rotary club that Wagner took the first step towards the diamond trade. "There was a doctor in town at that time who had invested in a company in California that was trying to design a machine to measure the colour of coloured gemstones,” Wagner explains. But the doctor thought he was being swindled and wanted someone to investigate the technology for him. "His lawyer was in my Rotary club,” Wagner says. And with a trip to California, Wagner entered the world of gemstones.
That doctor, Dr. James Stoll, created a company called Lambda Spec Instruments and invited Wagner to join him. They built the GemSpec, a machine that measures the colour of coloured gemstones. It is still used today, Wagner says, in the AGTA lab in New York, and by the Thai Gem and Jewellery Institute in Thailand, among others. "We slowly had little successes, but nothing that was worth having a great business over.”
Then Wagner got an idea. "While we were working with these labs we noticed that when we looked at diamonds on this machine some lit up and others didn’t,” he says. "That was right around the time that the cut debate was starting to heat up. We said: ‘Why argue about what cut is the best? Why not simply measure the light out of the stone?’” And with that – and some financial backing from Mike Scott, the renowned first president of Apple Computers who also happened to be a coloured gem collector and owner of a GemSpec machine – GemEx systems was on its way to becoming a company.
With a bit of convincing, Wagner sparked the interest of fellow Lambda Spec employee Kurt Schoeckert. The two-per-son company set up shop in a tiny office in Mequon, Wisconsin – a wealthy suburb of Milwaukee. Then Wagner and Schoeckert sat down, and with the basic technology already in place, tried to figure out something that neither of the engineers had a clue about. The two had to enter a raging debate in an industry they knew little about and convince people they had the answer: measure brilliance, fire and scintillation instead of colour, cut, clarity and carat.
Daniel Gordon says the best convincing is in the bottom line at his store. "Our sales are up by about 75 percent to 80 percent since we started using GemEx reports. And we’re just going into our fourth year of using it,” he says. Samuel Gordon Jewelers is a 100-year old, family-run jewellery store in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. As far as Gordon is concerned, the GemEx reports are invaluable.
While the store already has a solid reputation in the community, Gordon says the GemEx reports allow him to build trust with his customers on a whole other level. "We’re going one step further and showing the customer something that’s as close to factual as we can get,” he says. "It’s a matter of ‘don’t believe me just because I say so, look through this piece of technological equipment and see for yourself.’ This is a mysterious product they’re buying, and the BrillianceScope adds some sound of mind for them.”
The BrillianceScope Gordon is talking about isn’t just the machine which produces the reports, but also a compact "viewer” that GemEx offers to select jewellers to help with sales. It’s part of the GemEx package. How the technology works, Wagner explains, is that diamond-polishing houses bring the BrillianceScope analyzer into their facilities. After a diamond is polished, they scan the diamond in the analyzer.
The scans are then sent electronically to the GemEx headquarters in Wisconsin, where about a dozen employees check over the images. "The results are sent to us everyday and we review them to assure that it is a valid scan,” Wagner says. "That’s a critical part of our business. Every diamond that we do a report on we review twice to ensure that it’s a valid scan.” Only after GemEx has ensured that there isn’t a problem in scanning the diamond is a GemEx report issued with measurements of brilliance, fire and scintillation.
So the viewer, then, is a sales tool GemEx offers for use at the retail level. And Gordon says it’s an extremely useful tool. He says it allows a customer to look at two diamonds together, in different types of light, and determine which looks better to them. "It could be 4 p.m. or 10 p.m. You could be on this side of the store or that side of the store. There’s no way to capture light with the naked eye and know just from looking at it exactly what you’re seeing. There’s too many variables,” Gordon says. "This is the closest thing to doing that, getting to see it in a controlled light source environment.”
Arlan Abel, of Adamas Inc. in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has only been using the GemEx reports for about 10 months. But he says customers have embraced the light reading reports already. "People are buying something that’s pretty as well as having a certain quality aspect to it. In the past, the beauty has only been ensured by the architecture of the diamonds. Now, it’s measured directly,” he says. "The GemEx report really simplifies all of the issues that relate to cut. And now customers are really more conscious of buying something that’s beautiful as well as good quality.”
The BrillianceScope analyzer takes readings of white light (brilliance), coloured light (fire) and sparkle (scintillation). These results are then translated onto a bar graph, with the low end being the worst performing stone measured and the high end being the best-performing diamond measured. Abel says this graph – further subdivided into low, medium, high and very high categories – is a much more simple concept for customers to comprehend than the traditional four Cs method. "The quality aspect (colour, cut, clarity, carat) is a little more ambiguous for people, they can’t really visualize it,” he says. "If quality were done on a linear scale like the light reports, readings like ‘good, better and best’ would probably be more meaningful than ‘VS1, VS2 and SI1.’”
When it really comes down to it, Abel says, experience has shown customers will sacrifice quality for beauty: "If a diamond was built like a flat tire, I don’t think anyone would care – as long as it did well on a light report.”
With people like Gordon and Abel providing anecdotal evidence of increasing sales that they credit to the GemEx reports, it’s hard to imagine that the product has drawbacks. But it does. Stephen Ben-Oliel, of Sirius Diamonds, has opted not to use the BrillianceScope to analyze his diamonds despite being approached many times by GemEx. "The problem I have with GemEx – I don’t question their science – is that these machines can measure these different properties of light, but perhaps not in the same way as the human cortex,” Ben-Oliel says. "In the end, the diamond has to be pleasing to the human eye. You can measure it lots of different ways and have a machine say it is perfect, but ultimately the end user will still be the human eye.”
Although, Ben-Oliel isn’t completely against what GemEx is doing. "I would perhaps work with them to try and develop a more dispersive diamond, or a more scintillating diamond,” he says. "I think these machines will help in developing different cuts, and perhaps better cuts, down the road. Cut has been played so long and so much that you wonder if it’s really making a more beautiful diamond with the tiny subtle differences that the market today focuses on. Maybe in the end we will play more to human taste. Maybe what you would really like or what I would really like is different: you might like one that is more brilliant, and I’d like one with more colour.”
That people may want diamonds that perform in different ways is something that Wagner says he’s trying to teach his customers. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Some people like bright white light, that’s what they think is beautiful. Others like fire, and some like scintillation,” he says. That’s why Wagner is adamant about the purpose of the GemEx reports: "We’re not measuring beauty; we’re measuring what creates beauty in the diamond.”
With more than 10,000 reports a month being produced, GemEx is getting people to think about what makes a diamond beautiful. Some industry heavyweights have even begun to think about their diamonds in a different way. Companies like Star Diamond, Leo Schachter Diamonds, Zales, Sterling and Rosy Blue have all begun to use the GemEx reports. But 10,000 diamonds a month is still only a small number of the world diamond trade. So while the company may be a success, it has some distance to go before it can be called revolutionary. Still, it may only be a matter of time until jewellers set aside cut, colour, clarity and carat in favour of brilliance, fire and scintillation.