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A customer brings in a ring, sets it on the counter and says it is too big. The stone keeps sliding round to the palm side, so she spends the day turning it back. She wants it made smaller. Most of the time, making it smaller is the wrong repair, and she will be back in a month with a ring she can barely get off that still turns. Here is what is actually happening on your finger, and the fixes we use at the bench, cheapest and most reversible first. Reason one: your knuckle is wider than your finger...

A customer brought in a ruby ring last winter that her mother had worn for thirty years. Good red, oval stone, a little over two carats, set in yellow gold. She wanted it cleaned and the prongs checked. Under the microscope the stone showed a network of flash-coloured seams running through the cracks, which is what lead glass looks like when light hits it at the right angle. It was a fracture-filled ruby. Her mother had loved it, worn it every day, and nobody had ever told her it could not go in an ultrasonic cleaner. It had survived on...

Two people came in on the same Saturday last spring. One pair spent ninety minutes trying settings side by side, agreed on a low bezel in 14K yellow gold, and left with the wearer knowing exactly what was coming. The other was a man on his own with a photo of his girlfriend's hand, a borrowed ring in a sock, and a proposal booked for a cabin in three weeks. Both worked. We have also seen both fail. Here is what we have learned from watching this play out at the counter most weeks of the year. The case for...

A shoebox comes across the counter. Single earrings, a chain with a snapped link, a class ring nobody wears, a bracelet from an aunt. The question is always the same: what is this worth? Behind that question sits a second one people are too polite to ask, which is whether they are about to be taken advantage of. Here is the whole process as we run it at our Coquitlam bench, in order, so you know what should happen and what to walk away from. Step one: sorting by karat Everything gets spread on a tray and separated by marked...

An oval diamond will do something a round will not. It looks larger than its weight, it stretches the finger, and it carries a dark shape across the middle that no laboratory grades and no report mentions. That shape is the bow-tie. Every oval has one to some degree. Learning to read it is the whole job when you are shopping for this cut, so here is what causes it, why the paperwork cannot help you, and what to check before you pay. What the bow-tie actually is Hold an oval face-up and you may see a dark band running...

Two cushion cut diamonds sit on the counter. Same carat weight, same colour grade, same clarity grade, prices within two hundred dollars of each other. One throws big flashes of light you could count. The other shimmers like light on water. Buyers pick one and put the other down within about ten seconds, and most of them cannot say why. The reason is a single row of facets on the bottom of the stone, and it is the most useful thing anyone shopping for a cushion can learn. Where the cushion came from The cushion is old. GIA calls it...