68 STATE OF THE MAJORS 2026 early on to a career they perceive to be a lifelong sentence, he notes. “I polled the Facebook group asking gem cutters, ‘If you could get a job at a gem-cutting factory in your local town, and you got paid the same amount of money as a plumber, like $40 an hour or something, would you take that job?’ And 100 percent said no. “They don’t want anyone to tell them what to do. They don’t want to cut anything they don’t want to cut. They want to just cut the things they like or cut the designs they like. It’s a very artisan market.” That mentality, not surprisingly, doesn’t necessarily fly in a workshop. Instead of freewheeling (no pun intended) artists, workshops would prefer cutters trained in specific ways and may perceive self-taught cutters’ processes—which Prim described as “quirky”—or slower pace as adverse qualities. But, without novice cutters to train from scratch, self-made craftsmen who are open to being retrained are their only option in many cases. CAREER AVENUES While not every student who attends his school is looking to start a business, Prim is candid with those who are looking to make a career of lapidary work. “As a gem cutter, you almost always have to be an entrepreneur,” he says. “The downside is you have an income cap, and that is how many stones you can do a day.” He estimates five, but that’s on a day when you don’t need to an- swer emails, go to the post office, or create content for social media. He encourages those who are serious about becoming a full-time lapidarist to start with local jewelers. “Every jeweler in America needs someone to do repairs and recuts, and they don’t know who to send it to,” he says. “If your jeweler discovers there’s a good [local] gem cutter at a reasonable price and they don’t have to send it to New York, poten- tially get it lost in the mail or just have it be away from their city ... There’s an unlimited amount of work that way.” Once a relationship is established, Prim says a jeweler might even start asking their cutter to source material for them at trade shows to bring back and cut to their specifications. “That’s a long-term plan, but you can do it, especially in a rural area,” he says. DIGITAL COMMUNITY Prim got into the industry in 2014 at the age of 30. At the time, he’d just moved to San Francisco from Chicago, and a coworker introduced him to gem shows. Soon after, he found and joined a lapidary club two blocks from his house. “For two years, I went there every single day before and after work, and I learned how to make [cabochons]. I learned how to carve a little bit, but what I wanted to do was faceting, and there was a two-year waiting list for the faceting class,” he says. When he finally got into the faceting class, he was hooked. He bought a machine online, and within a year, he moved to Bangkok to go to the Gemological Institute of America. Online communities and resources played a major role in Prim’s immersion into the lapidary world. “By the time I really got deep into cutting, I was already on my way to Bangkok, and so of course, I was able to see the stones that were in Bangkok, but I didn’t meet [American cutters] until a lot later,” he says. “My early inspirations were those American cutters who were posting on Instagram.” Some of the content creators he recalls discovering online were Jean-Noel Soni of Top Notch Faceting, a lapidarist known for embrac- ing crystals’ natural forms, and Arya Akhavan, the plastic surgeon and RETAIL THE STATE OF DIAMONDS JEWELRY DESIGN COLORED STONES Clockwise from top right, a 2.37-carat heated sapphire from Dry Cottonwood Creek, Montana, a 4.30-carat Ethiopian opal, and a 3.19-carat heated Cambodian zircon JENNA SLOANE “She Who Dares the Night,” an 18-karat gold ring set with a 2.37-carat heated sapphire from Dry Cottonwood Creek, Montana, and accented with 1 carat of D-color, VS clarity diamonds and 1 carat of color-enhanced diamonds. Designed by Olivia Sugarman Jewelry, center stone cut by Jenna Sloane Stones
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