On the Floating Diamond

A note from Catherine on the signature technique at the center of our charms, pendants, and necklaces — and what it takes to hold a stone in place without any metal touching it.

The stone is not set. It’s suspended.

Most diamonds in pendants and charms are held in place by prongs or bezels — small metal structures that wrap around the stone and anchor it to a chain or finding. They work, and they have for centuries. But they cover part of the stone and announce the architecture of the mount before the eye reaches the diamond itself.

The floating diamond technique removes the surrounding metal entirely. The stone is held by a laser-drilled channel through the diamond itself — a microscopic bore through the center of the stone, through which a fine jump ring is threaded and closed. The jump ring connects directly to a chain. There’s no head and no bezel, no setting in the conventional sense. From every angle, the diamond appears to float in air. (For the record: those jump rings are 14k yellow on yellow pieces and platinum on white pieces, both chosen for the slight flexibility a stone-bearing ring needs that other metals don’t offer.)

The drilling, and the people who do it.

The technology to laser-drill a diamond has existed since the 1960s. It was originally developed to improve clarity, by reaching internal inclusions and bleaching them invisible. For decades, laser drilling was considered a treatment — something disclosed in fine print.

The drilling for our floating diamond pieces is done by a partner in New York’s diamond district, a third-generation family business that has spent seven decades on precision diamond work, including the beaded diamond technique the floating diamond is built on. I source the stones, sketch the pieces, attach and weld the jump rings, and finish each piece by hand. The drilling itself is a precision specialty that takes a lifetime to learn, and it’s done by the people who have spent that lifetime learning it.

The technology that started as a clarity treatment is now used for a different purpose. The channel drilled through the stone doesn’t alter its optical performance — the bore is precise enough to be nearly invisible, and the brilliance is preserved. What changes is how the stone is held, and how the piece reads when it’s on you.

The diamond is most of what you’re paying for.

A conventional pendant setting starts around two thousand dollars before you’ve added the stone — the cost of metal weight, prong work, a head, and the labor of building all of it. A floating piece doesn’t carry that overhead. The “setting” is a chain or a jump ring plus the cost of the drill, a fraction of what a built mount costs. What you’re paying for, almost entirely, is the stone.

That changes the math at every price point. A budget that buys a 0.75-carat stone in a traditional pendant might buy a 1.5-carat in a floating one. The stone is the piece, and the budget goes to the stone.

Built for the wear.

Floating diamonds photograph beautifully — the open setting catches light from more angles than a prong-set stone does, and nothing shadows the diamond on camera. That’s worth saying because it’s true. It’s also the smaller half of the case for them.

The bigger half is that they hold up. A great deal of fine pendant and charm work has been over-engineered for the moment of acquisition: elaborate prong baskets, raised heads, intricate gallery settings that look architectural in a close-up but spend the rest of the piece’s life snagging on cashmere and wearing out at predictable points of failure. Prongs lose tension, a bezel develops a hairline gap, and a stone goes missing somewhere between morning and evening, a decade in.

The floating diamond doesn’t have those failure points because it doesn’t have those parts. No prongs to bend, no head to come loose from the bail. The stone passes through a chain or a jump ring, and that’s the entire mechanism. Less metal between you and the diamond, less metal to fail. It’s a piece built for the ten thousand days that come after.

What the technique allows.

The technique also allows configurations that prongs and bezels cannot. A row of diamonds set along a chain at intervals. A single stone suspended at the lowest point of a delicate necklace where a conventional setting would weigh the piece down. Diamonds layered across multiple chains so that movement reveals different stones at different moments. The aesthetic vocabulary of the Core Collection was not possible ten years ago.

That vocabulary runs through every piece in the Core Collection — and it’s the starting point for the bespoke conversations that produce our most singular work.

What this says about the house.

When you buy a floating diamond piece, you’re buying a technical solution to an aesthetic problem: how to let a stone speak without the vocabulary of the setting getting in the way. You’re also buying a piece where almost all of your money goes to the stone, and a piece designed to wear the way you actually wear jewelry — through sleeves and tote bags and the rest of it.

You’re also, quietly, buying seven decades of someone else’s craft alongside mine. The drilling specialists I work with have been doing this since long before I was born. The pieces in this house exist because that expertise exists, in that family, in that specific corner of midtown Manhattan.

Those are several reasons to choose a floating piece, and any one of them is enough. Most of my customers come in for one and stay for all of them.

— Catherine