FIFTEEN MASTERS OF THE INDEX GEAR: 45 LANDMARK GEMSTONE DESIGNS

Every modern faceting diagram is an argument about how light should behave inside a crystal. Long before GPU ray tracers could evaluate nineteen tilt angles in twenty milliseconds, a generation of engineers, mathematicians, and bench cutters worked out the geometry of modern gem cutting with slide rules, seven-place logarithm tables, brass index gears, and thousands of hours at a spinning lap.

To celebrate a century of gemological engineering, we selected fifteen of the most influential gemstone designers in faceting history and compiled three signature designs from each master (forty-five landmark cuts in total) into our GPU Bidirectional Path Tracer. Every crystal below is rendered directly from its authentic three-dimensional polyhedron using the exact same studio lighting, camera angle, and path-tracing settings (identical to the renders across our store catalog), with physical spectral dispersion, Beer-Lambert mineral absorption, and full multi-bounce internal reflection.

Look at the crown atlas above and you can trace the entire evolution of custom faceting in a single sweep: from Marcel Tolkowsky's 1919 eight-fold round brilliant and Basil Watermeyer's mixed-cut Barion crescents to the Seattle meetpoint revolution of Robert Long and Norman Steele, Fred Van Sant's 64-gear Star Cuts, Robert Strickland's chiral spirals and nine-fold enneagrams, Jeff Graham's high-yield money cuts, Marco Voltolini's 80-gear botanical blossoms, Arya Akhavan's high-facet championship tessellations, and seven more masters from Europe, North America, South Africa, and Australia.

1. Marcel Tolkowsky (1899 To 1991): The Father Of Mathematical Gem Optics#

Born into a famous Antwerp diamond-cutting family in 1899, Marcel Tolkowsky trained as an engineer and mathematician at the University of London. In 1919, at just twenty years old, he published his doctoral monograph Diamond Design: A Study of the Reflection and Refraction of Light in a Diamond. Before Tolkowsky, diamond proportions were guarded guild secrets tuned by eye and rough weight retention. Tolkowsky treated the round brilliant as a coupled optical resonator: he calculated the exact pavilion main angle (40.75 degrees) where entering rays undergo two-bounce total internal reflection across the culet without leaking through the bottom, and paired it with a 34.5-degree crown bezel and a 53 percent table to balance white brilliance against prismatic rainbow fire.

2. Basil Watermeyer (1913 To 2000): Inventor Of The Barion Cut#

For most of the twentieth century, gem cutters faced a frustrating choice on square, rectangular, pentagonal, and hexagonal rough: cut a traditional step-cut emerald (which preserves carat weight in the corners but sacrifices central scintillation), or force a round-cone brilliant pavilion onto a polygonal outline (which requires gouging deep, weight-wasting ears into the girdle).

In 1971, South African master diamond cutter Basil Watermeyer (author of the landmark reference Diamond Cutting) solved that dilemma by inventing the Barion cut (named after his wife Marion). Watermeyer placed a steep row of step-cut girdle facets just below the waist, transitioned into crescent-shaped intermediate facets, and met a radiant brilliant-style culet cone at the bottom center. That hybrid pavilion acts like an optical funnel: it follows a polygonal or cushion outline effortlessly while bouncing light back from the center with the lively snap of a round brilliant.

Look closely at the Pentagonal Barion Cushion in the center above: because five-fold symmetry places every pavilion facet opposite a facet junction rather than a parallel mirror plane, light rays entering at an angle cannot leak out the far side. Pairing Watermeyer's Barion crescent step-downs with an 80-tooth pentagonal outline produces one of the brightest, richest colored-stone cushions ever drawn.

3. Robert H. Long And Norman W. Steele: Architects Of Meetpoint Faceting#

If you have ever cut a gemstone where every tier is defined by touching a geometric intersection of two earlier facets rather than dialing in an arbitrary micrometer depth, you are standing on the shoulders of Robert H. Long and Norman W. Steele. Working through the Seattle Faceters Guild beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, Long and Steele co-authored the multi-volume Facet Design series and built the Personal Computer (PC) Faceting Index, cataloguing thousands of diagrams by shape family.

Before Long and Steele popularized Centerpoint-Angle Meetpoint (CAM) faceting, cutting a pear, oval, or cushion required trial-and-error preforming where a slight slip on the mast left the girdle wavy and uneven. Long and Steele proved that cutting a sacrificial centerpoint cone first (or establishing exact angular meetpoints on the pavilion) locks the entire three-dimensional geometry of the stone into a self-correcting chain of vertex intersections.

4. Fred W. Van Sant (1927 To 2008): Master Of The Star Cuts Series#

An Oregon dentist with a passion for precision geometry, Fred W. Van Sant authored more than 360 original faceting designs across six volumes of Star Cuts (1988 to 1997) and his Extra Designs series, all generously released into the public domain in memory of Charles L. Moon. Working primarily on a 64-tooth index gear, Van Sant was a virtuoso of high-scintillation pavilion splits, floating star crowns, and split-main cushions that turn even modest-RI colored stones into miniature kaleidoscopes.

Notice how in FVS-36 Orion and FVS-162 Modified Orion, Van Sant staggers three pavilion tiers between 41.0 and 45.7 degrees on alternating 64-gear teeth, creating over one hundred micro-mirrors that switch on and off rapidly with the slightest tilt of the hand.

5. Robert W. Strickland: Creator Of Gemcad, Gemray, And Chiral Symmetry#

Modern faceting can be divided into two eras: before and after Robert W. Strickland wrote GemCAD and GemRay. By giving every custom cutter an interactive three-dimensional polyhedral CAD drafting table and ray tracer on a personal computer, Strickland transformed gem design from trigonometric guesswork into an exact visual discipline, while also curating the USFG Facet Diagrams archive alongside Long and Steele.

As a designer in his own right, Strickland delighted in pushing rotational symmetry into territories that few cutters dared to try: chiral (handed) pinwheels that lack mirror planes, nine-fold enneagrams on a standard 96-tooth gear, and tableless domed globes.

Take a moment to appreciate the mathematical wit of Ennea96 in the middle panel above. A 96-tooth gear divides evenly by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, 24, 32, and 48, but not by 9. To place nine star points around a 96-index circle, Strickland used bilateral mirror symmetry across the 96-48 axis and slightly adjusted the angles of each mirrored pair of crown and pavilion facets so that their three-dimensional intersections land on a virtually perfect regular enneagon!

6. Jeff R. Graham (1949 To 2009): Champion Of The High-yield Money Cuts#

A professional cutter, teacher, and author of nine faceting books (including Gram Faceting Designs and Money Cuts), Jeff R. Graham approached gem design from the unforgiving reality of the commercial lapidary bench. When you are cutting expensive tourmaline, sapphire, or tanzanite rough for a living, a diagram that takes six hours of fussy cheater adjustments or grinds away 80 percent of the crystal is a failure.

Graham engineered cuts that maximize rough weight yield, cut fast with rock-solid meetpoints, and throw bold, high-contrast flashes across the room even in lower-RI minerals like quartz and beryl.

7. Marco Voltolini: Maestro Of Botanical Crowns And 80-index Floral Geometry#

While classic twentieth-century faceting treated the crown primarily as a flat window framed by narrow bevels, contemporary Italian master designer Marco Voltolini turned the crown into botanical sculpture. Working frequently on an 80-tooth index gear (which unlocks five-fold pentagons and ten-fold decagons alongside four-fold and eight-fold symmetries) as well as 96-gear hexagons, Voltolini layers shallow, overlapping crown petals at 15 to 28 degrees over high-brilliance pavilions so that a flower or star floats right inside the crystal.

8. Arya Akhavan: Steward Of The Open Archive And Grand-master Tessellations#

Physician, chemist, and master gem cutter Arya Akhavan founded The Gemology Project, the largest open-access repository of modern meetpoint faceting diagrams in the world, preserving hundreds of contemporary designs alongside his own prolific portfolio. Akhavan's designs are unmistakable for their bold titles, playful literary notes, and fearless geometric ambition: from multi-tier vortex pavilions like Heavens-Piercing Drill to 132-facet championship showpieces like Luna's Glow.

9. Alexandre Wolkonsky And Piet Van Zanten: European Pioneers Of Mini-barions And Radiant Stars#

Working across France and the Netherlands from the 1980s through the early 2000s, Alexandre Wolkonsky and Dutch mathematical collaborator Piet van Zanten authored Mini Barion Designs (1990) and Wolkonsky Faceting Designs (1995). By streamlining Basil Watermeyer's deep Barion pavilions into compact Mini-Barions and pairing them with ten-ray and twelve-ray star crowns, they proved that high-order European star cuts could retain rough weight while throwing dazzling central brilliance.

10. Walt Heitland: Pacific Northwest Champion Of Snowflakes And Odd-symmetry Stars#

A pillar of the Vancouver Island Faceters Guild and regular contributor to Meet Points and Off the Dop throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, Walt Heitland designed dozens of competition cuts celebrated for their crisp winter-snowflake geometry and clever multi-symmetry blends on 80-tooth and 96-tooth index gears.

11. Glenn Klein: Author Of Faceting Limits And High-facet Radiance#

Author of Faceting Limits and Glenn Klein's World of Special Cuts, California master cutter Glenn Klein explored what happens when a round or hexagonal gemstone is subdivided into more than one hundred micro-facets arranged in tightly tuned concentric rings, creating a dense mosaic of crisp pinpoint reflections.

12. Jim Perkins: Regional Diamonds And High-contrast Star Brilliants#

Prolific American designer Jim Perkins contributed some of the most beloved pictorial and regional cuts in the USFG archive, ranging from quartz pebbles honoring New Jersey's historic Cape May Diamonds to high-index hexagonal showstoppers like The Star of Galahad and his 80-gear Eye of the Eagle.

13. Henk Prins: South African Master Of Unstacked Zircon And Checker Crowns#

Continuing South Africa's proud tradition of mathematical gem cutting after Basil Watermeyer, Henk Prins is renowned for his unstacked nine-main rounds (where crown and pavilion mains are offset onto alternating index teeth to prevent facet-doubling blur in doubly refractive Zircon) and crisp hexagonal stars like Hexstarr.

14. Michiko Huynh: Architect Of The 311 Barion Series And Botanical Crowns#

Contemporary designer Michiko Huynh gained a devoted following in the online faceting community for her 311 series (such as Quake311 Barion Oval and Hope 311) alongside lush 80-gear tropical blossoms like Plumeria 80. Her 311 pavilions pair high-angle Barion girdle cheeks with finely split culet fans that keep ovals and octagons bright from corner to corner.

15. Anthony (tony) Collins: Australian Explorer Of Illusion Crowns And Trilliants#

Representing the Victorian Faceters Guild in Australia, Anthony (Tony) Collins is celebrated for optical-illusion cuts (like Dragon Eye and his ZigZag Girdle Illusion Hex) and high-fire radiant trilliants like Princess Trilliant.

16. Top 10 Landmark Cuts By Refractive Index And Base Shape#

Before looking at the chart below, a warm note of fairness: these classic human designs were created for very different goals than the stones in our collection. Human masters often design for rough weight retention, fast and forgiving meetpoints at the bench, botanical crown art, or a specific optical pattern, whereas every stone in our catalog is computer-optimized specifically around our optical metrics (brightness, contrast, Shannon entropy, scintillation, windowing, and rainbow fire). In that sense, judging classic hand-crafted diagrams by our own scoring formula is a bit unfair, and this is certainly not a contest, but for those who are curious where the top ten stand against our catalog in the exact same material and base shape:

What stands out first is how remarkably well the classic masters hold their own, with Glenn Klein's Atlas in sapphire and Marcel Tolkowsky's original diamond cut outperforming the vast majority of modern computer-generated designs in their cohorts. Tolkowsky's original proportions even edge out our Hearts and Arrows reference cut because his slightly flatter crown and wider table open a broader window for light across tilted viewing angles. Above all, high-index crystals like diamond, cubic zirconia, and sapphire give human designers generous internal reflection to work with, allowing decades of bench intuition to shine right alongside modern GPU optimization.

17. References And Archival Sources#

1. Tolkowsky, M. (1919). Diamond Design: A Study of the Reflection and Refraction of Light in a Diamond. E. & F. N. Spon, London.
2. Watermeyer, B. (1980, 1991). Diamond Cutting: A Complete Guide to Diamond Processing (1st and 4th editions). Purnell / Centaur Publishers, Johannesburg.
3. Long, R. H., and Steele, N. W. (1979 to 1991). Facet Design (Volumes 1 to 7) and the PC Faceting Index. Seattle Faceters Guild.
4. Van Sant, F. W. (1988 to 1999). Star Cuts (Volumes I to VI) and Extra Designs. Public domain memorial archive in honor of Charles L. Moon.
5. Strickland, R. W. (1991 to 2016). GemCAD, GemRay, and the USFG Facet Diagrams Archive (facetdiagrams.org).
6. Graham, J. R. (1998 to 2008). Gram Faceting Designs and Money Cuts. United States Faceters Guild Competition Archives.
7. Wolkonsky, A., and van Zanten, P. (1990 to 2002). Mini Barion Designs (AFG, 1990) and Wolkonsky Faceting Designs (1995).
8. Heitland, W., Klein, G., and Perkins, J. (1988 to 2008). Meet Points (Vancouver Island FG), Faceting Limits, and USFG PC Diagram Archives.
9. Voltolini, M., Akhavan, A., Prins, H., Huynh, M., and Collins, A. (2010 to 2024). The Gemology Project Open Faceting Design Archive (gemologyproject.com).