The Science of Art: The Beauty of Diamonds

With an illustrious career spanning almost six decades and numerous fantastically large polished diamonds to his name, Gabi Tolkowsky knows diamond cutting – or, as he prefers to call it, diamond fashioning.

Although this expert master cutter knows better than most the technical, mathematical side of diamond cutting, he seems most passionate about the philosophical side of the process – for example, whether turning a chunk of rough carbon extracted from the ground into a masterpiece of a polished diamond is more of an art or a science. “It is definitely an art. It’s an art that uses all the discoveries of technology and the technological tools.” But this is by no means the end of the discussion. 

The point, Tolkowsky says, is not that the process involves technology or is done according to scientific principles, but that “people are planning, designing, splitting and fashioning the stone according to its individual beauty.” Admittedly, ‘science’ is a vague term, but a relevant definition would include those aspects of the diamond cutting process that can be measured and calculated. Art, on the other hand, is more nuanced, and measuring it – its quality, beauty or worth – is about as subjective as it gets.

Both art and science, Tolkowsky explains, are necessary in the process of creating polished diamonds. After all, it was his great uncle, Marcel, who published one of the most important scientific works on diamond polishing to date. His 1919 publication, Diamond Design, part of an engineering dissertation, examined the dispersion and behavior of light in a diamond and presented ideal proportions for drawing the maximum amount of fire and brilliance from a polished stone. It was the first mathematical and optical analysis of a diamond’s cut and, according to Gabi Tolkowsky, its significance lay in its description of the “journey of light inside a diamond.” In short, this ‘journey of light’, he explains, “functions the way it does because of the diamond’s characteristic as a limpid and transparent matter, like a mirror or like water.”

“The light reflects back out of the diamond, creating a tremendous return of fire, light and scintillation – the entirety of light,” in a well-cut diamond, of course. So, in fact, as Tolkowsky explains, the polished diamond’s resultant beauty, or the artistic aspect, is dependent upon the polisher having effectively worked with the scientific principles of the process to create the maximum amount of light return and scintillation.

Tolkowsky notes a discrepancy, however, between the aesthetic properties of diamonds, which he asserts are the main drive behind the diamond industry in the first place, and the technical and mathematical aspect of grading or deciding that a diamond cut must adhere to certain proportions and measurements. “Who decides,” he asks rhetorically, “when they examine a diamond, that it’s beautiful? The diamantaire? The graduate gemologist? The wholesaler? It’s none of these. The retailer is the only one who looks at a diamond and judges its beauty.”

The point, he says, is that throughout the pipeline, diamonds are valued according to scientific and mathematical principles, but the overarching goal is to create an end product with beauty – one that is, in essence, a work of art.

“The consumer, the one actually buying the diamond in the end, doesn’t care about its proportions. They care if it has fire, if it’s beautiful, but there’s no room in the process for a polisher, diamantaire or grader to judge a diamond’s beauty.”

Diamonds are created, according to Tolkowsky, for adornment, which is the oldest language of humanity, going back to our earliest ancestors. “Even before humanity had a language, adornment was a form of communication – of one person physically showing another what they thought was beautiful by, for example, taking a piece of bark and turning it into a piece of jewelry.” And adorning is in itself a form of art, which, he says, is how they should be created.

In addition to being works of art created with the help of science, diamonds are also becoming more commoditized. Tolkowsky recalls that the trade is, in fact, very young. In the years following World War II, a mass of ‘luxury’ products that had previously been accessible only to the rich and powerful began to be acquired by the burgeoning middle class in western countries; diamonds, once the darlings of the wealthy and super wealthy, have similarly been on a steady path of commoditization. The drive to market diamonds to everyone, he says, has created a situation in which almost anyone can buy a diamond, which in turn has encouraged a situation in which diamonds are increasingly mass produced.

Today, a growing middle class, one with deeper pockets and aspirations toward luxury, has been one of the factors contributing to the democratization of diamonds. Another, notes Tolkowsky, is the development of technologies in the cutting and polishing processes, allowing mass numbers of diamonds to be polished almost entirely by machine – without any human expertise. Although this is good for business in some sectors, it is admittedly not such a pretty picture for those who, like Tolkowsky, see diamonds as first and foremost one-of-a-kind works of art.

Perhaps it’s his years of working intimately with individual facets of diamonds large and small, but Tolkowsky does not believe that machines will ever replace humans completely in diamond polishing. To illustrate, he rhetorically asks how many hundred carat diamonds people would want to cut with machinery – none, of course. How about 10 carat diamonds? Also none. The fact is, he explains, that inserting a rough diamond into a machine, pressing a button and getting a polished diamond on the other side, only works for very small stones, sizes of which there are enough to mass produce in the first place.

The larger stones, of which there are far fewer, are so big, and their designs and facet structures so intricately complex, that it will always take a highly skilled polisher to work with them. In addition, a machine, even one that’s technically precise down to the last nut and bolt, cannot judge beauty. “The human eye, and human expertise, will always be necessary to determine the beauty of a diamond,” he says.

In an age of increasingly savvy and persuasive marketing, it is worth asking whether this ‘beauty of a diamond’ Tolkowsky speaks of is inherent to the material or if it is a result of decades of well-funded marketing campaigns.

“Indeed, mining companies have found it necessary and lucrative to invest heavily in marketing and publicity for the products they sell,” he explains, “just like with any product, especially luxury. But the story of diamonds is much more than just luxury. Not one diamond is similar to another. This fact is physically, scientifically and geologically confirmed. And so we can promote this, and we know that diamonds are in fact different.”

So different, in fact, that when one with substantial size is discovered and polished into a veritable masterpiece, it makes headlines. Tolkowsky himself has had the opportunity – and skill – to fashion a few exceptionally large diamonds. In 1989, he began working on De Beers’ 599 carat rough stone, which he eventually fashioned into the 273.85 carat Centenary diamond. He was also at the same time working on the 545.67 carat Golden Jubilee, the largest polished diamond in the world, presented to the King of Thailand in 1997 for the 50th anniversary of his coronation.

The process of designing and polishing the Centenary, which was carried out in a specially designed underground room in the De Beers Diamond Research Laboratory in Johannesburg, took three years to complete. Tolkowsky explains that he was inevitably changed by the process, which he describes as “a challenge and a conversation with the diamond until the last facet.”

Although he implies that, despite his famous family legacy in the diamond world, he is not much different than anyone else in terms of skill, only in opportunity, he says the process was extremely challenging. “You are challenged every moment while you are dealing with that kind of diamond. Every experience brings new challenges, and, as the diamond changes, you change, and the world changes around you.”