Being inside GIA to take a course is a great experience. Students are of all ages, from young people choosing GIA instead of a regular college, to jewelers already in the business and being funded by their companies to take courses for professional advancement, to people like me who wanted to learn all they could about gemstones.
The lobby is expansive and built to impress--after all, this IS the seat of the gemstone business in the U.S. A circular room off the lobby contains ever-changing displays of fabulous jewelry set with magnificent gemstones, most of which has been donated to GIA by successful graduates and patrons. The classroom wing, where I spent most of my time, is also lined with displays set into the corridor walls behind thick glass. These displays are educational in nature, each devoted to a different group of gems, such as beryls, or tourmalines, or zircons. You can look through the glass and see large gemstones displayed with accompanying text informing you about the nature of those stones. Some display cases would have miniature sculptures either carved completely out of gem material, or they would be encrusted, completely covered, with faceted stones in different colors.
The classes I took each ran eight hours a day for an entire week, and when we took breaks or lunch, we would empty out into the corridor and the classroom would be locked behind us to protect the gemstones and equipment we were working with. Sometimes we would return before the instructor did and we would have to wait out in the corridor, but it was never boring because we could just gaze at the sparkling gemstones in the display cases.
Or, we could stroll outside where a large patio and walkway overlooks the ocean, offering a bird's eye view of Carlsbad's colorful flower farms, planted just below. One day I walked the length of the classroom building and found myself in a small courtyard where a second building offered a blank face to the world. I approached and saw that the door was locked, and next to it, a guard posted behind bulletproof glass told me that this building was GIA's famous gem-testing lab. Only the staff enters there. So I returned to my classroom.
As befitting the nature of the industry, the instructors at GIA were all top-notch professionals in their fields, most of whom held jobs in the jewelry industry before coming to GIA to teach. They dressed impeccably, as though they had just come from behind a jewelry counter at Tiffany's. No Birkenstocks and torn jeans here! Each of the courses I took had two instructors, and both had extensive experience in buying and selling gemstones. One also had lapidary experience--he had cut faceted stones for a living. These people can answer just about any question you can think of, and believe me, I thought of a lot. My two instructors were friendly, funny, informative, and extremely helpful, all while maintaining their professionalism.
Each of the courses I took involved in-depth background information about the stones--their history, where and how they are mined, their distinguishing physical attributes (in the case of colored stones, these are many), and, their imperfections (and in the case of diamonds, these are many).
I found it amusing that instructors at GIA never talk about stones, even diamonds, in terms of "flaws"--you won't hear the word used. Instead they use the term, "characteristics." This is because they are training the people who will be selling diamonds, and 99.99% of all diamonds have some imperfections. A perfect, flawless diamond is so rare that if you actually owned one, you would NEVER wear it--You would keep it in a safe deposit box so that it would never get accidentally chipped or damaged in some way, which would of course, cause its relative value to plummet. A flawless diamond is not a wearable gem.
Diamonds and transparent colored gemstones are crystals, and those crystals come from deep within the earth. Being made of natural material, they all have tiny imperfections--inclusions of foreign material, tiny fractures, "clouds", "feathers", extra crystals growing on them, etc. Colored stones can have variations in color intensity within the stone as well. Add to that the human dimension of the cutter, who might set the facets not quite symmetrically, or who might cut the stone in less than an ideal, perfect shape so as to maximize its carat weight, and thus, its price--and you have gems that can look fine to the untrained eye, but which have a variety of imperfections.
With diamonds especially, the public tends to assume that they are expensive because they are pure, clear, and perfect. Finding out about their imperfections can be quite a shock, perhaps even disillusionment. However, to GIA, these natural imperfections, these characteristics, are what make each diamond in the world unique. A GIA certificate is, at heart, a complete portrait of a gemstone, inside and out, and in their diamond grading course, we learned how to paint that portrait.
The only way you can learn about diamonds, really, is to work with the real thing. I myself inspected, I would guess, several dozen different diamonds during the week-long diamond-grading course. But if there are any enterprising criminals out there reading this and thinking of planning a diamond heist from a GIA classroom in the future, don't bother. The diamonds the students work with, although real enough, contain so many flaws that you couldn't get much for them on the open market.
The culmination of the course is a big exam during which you have two hours to grade two different diamonds that you have picked randomly from a pile of envelopes at the front of the room. In the exam, you have to fill out a diamond grading report which is identical to those your jeweler obtains from GIA for the diamonds he sells. In it, I not only had to weigh the stone, but also assess its color, the quality of its cut, and I had to plot out on a map of the diamond, the location and type of every single characteristic inside it and on its surface. Based on plotting all these characteristics, I had to evaluate and grade the stone's overall clarity.
It was just my luck that the first stone I chose happened to be so included that I couldn't even see through it--It had a huge mess of problems, each and every one I had to identify, code, and plot in the correct position on a drawing of a diamond. (This, incidentally, is another reason a GIA certification is so valuable: It contains a detailed "map" of the inside and outside of your diamond, with the type and location of each characteristic accurately drawn--A one-of-a-kind portrait of your stone that protects you should anyone ever try to switch your diamond for one of lesser quality when you take it in to be resized or cleaned.)
Anyway, to make a long and nerve-wracking story short, it took me an hour and a half of the alloted two hours, just to grade my first diamond of the exam. Fortunately, the second one I pulled was much cleaner and I was able to finish in time, and even get a 96% score on the exam! This exam gets entered in the GIA record, and it and my certificate show that I know diamonds.
next....a bit about colored stones
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