Match as Match Can: Finding a Topaz for a Missing Earring

It’s not an uncommon demand for a jeweler: “I lost an earring, can you find me a matching gem to replace it?”

Sometimes this is an easy task. For example, amethyst is extremely uniform so it’s easy to match – I really don’t even have to look at the original to know if the match will work. Most amethyst comes from the same locations and it all looks the same - more or less. Ruby is another fairly easy gem to match, surprisingly. Once you know the origin, at least!

I was recently asked if a heated Burma ruby that was on the reddish side (a stone the client bought from me a few months ago) would match a set of Burma rubies that I had in my Etsy stock. Normally that’s impossible to know. I need both gems in my possession and hold them up next to one another to see if they match. Color memory is not specific enough, even if you have experience with looking at a lot of gems. Even when you want to match a paint sample, you need the original. You cannot do it from memory. No-one can. Anyway, given that I do know how Burma rubies look, I was able to conjecture that mine would be a match and they were. Had I only owned Mozambique rubies I would have known right away that they don’t match the Burmese material. Mozambique gems look different – more warm or reddish – to me.

The request that’s the topic of this blog, however, was a difficult one: to match natural imperial topaz. While all imperial topaz is mined in Brazil, the gem has bi-color qualities ranging from pink to orange, and that makes it very difficult. For example, you need to (try to) look carefully at where the pink starts and the orange ends in the gem and try to match that (basically that’s not even an option). Also, 95% of it is not very clean and that can really change how the gem looks and performs. The shades of pinkish and orange range from intense to washed out.

In addition to that, I needed a marquis gem of a specific length and depth. Imperial topaz rough is oblong, but despite that marquis cuts are rare. Most of them are elongated pears or cushion gems. So I could have looked at hundreds of cushions but only about 20-30 marquis.

Finally, the gem I was matching was still in its setting. The setting hadn’t been cleaned in a while so dirt had accumulated behind the gem that will come out in the ultrasonic when the second gem is set and both are re-polished. That, and the setting itself (the metal as well as the metal color), also changes the color of the gem. The dirt makes the gem look darker, and the setting makes it both darker and more sparkly when the metal reflects off of it. So I had to guess how it would look in the setting, how much darker it would look when it is made into a matching earring – and if it still matches at that point.

The only way to get a 100% match in a situation like this is to cut the gems from the same rough. That is how you get a matched opal set (and that is the only way to do it, by the way). But this wasn’t an option – I would have had to replace the matched pair with another matched pair. And matched pairs are even less common than individual loose gems – far less common in fact.

As the video shows, I ended up finding a slightly lighter colored gem that was cut to match. It was a pear shape originally.

The same client also gave me a topaz baguette for which she wanted a matched set of elongated pear earrings. But the seller, who actually specializes in Imperial Topaz, had only one set that matched some of the parameters. It wasn’t very bi-color though – more leaning towards orange than the very pretty padparadscha pinkish orange. So I again opted for two individual stones, one of which was cut to match the other.

The entire process of finding the gem took about two hours. Client communication made that about double in terms of time investment (so if you have only a few days in Tucson you can take on one or two of these projects and that’s about it).

When we got back here, I gave the gem to a well-known cutter in the wholesale trade (no retail), named W. Schuler, who has been in business since 1970. His cutting of course is superior to the local cutting in Brazil, which added another level of difficulty. Cutting to match does not mean you cut every facet the same. That’s impossible. Plus you don’t want the other properties of the gem – i.e. depth – to change too much because then you might end up getting a lighter color or lose some of the bi-color effect.

Anyway, we made it happen with about 90% success. The best you can get perhaps when you try an arranged marriage between two unicorns.