How This Guy Replicates Diamonds

My name is John Hatleberg

and I create replicas of dozens of famous diamonds.

People think of gems as a commodity,

in their smallest regard

and throughout history they've taken on so much symbolism

and it had many different ways

they've related to aspects of people's lives.

So I try to bring many different personalities

and aspects to gems.

[jazzy music]

Hello, everybody!

Diamonds are so incredibly brilliant.

And the reason they're so brilliant is that

they're essentially a crystal lattice of pure carbon.

And that particular element in it's cubic form,

when light comes into it, it slows the light down.

To replicate that I have to come up with a material

that can give the same quality of dispersion,

fire, white light, brilliance.

I really think of it

as trying to replicate Mona Lisa's smile.

So, when someone asks me to make a replica,

someone hands me a diamond and I'd make a silicone mold

of the top and bottom.

So that gives me a negative of the actual gem.

From that, I pour a mica resin cast.

So it's exactly the size and shape as the original diamond.

And that becomes my architectural model.

Once I have my resin cast,

I can unlock all the original angles and indices

from the cutter.

I love the fact that I'm completely following the footsteps

of someone who had cut this original in the past,

whether the diamond was finished last week or 500 years ago.

So, the actual mapping,

it's the process of reverse engineering.

So I'm actually, instead of putting the crystal in the head

and then starting to cut it,

what I do is I put the cast of the diamond in the head

and with something very technical called a grease pencil,

I cover over a facet and have it intersect with the lap

and just wait until the grease pencil

just smears off cleanly.

And then I know I have the facet locked in.

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I love making the map.

I love it in part because

the end result is this beautiful drawing

that's another interpretation of the gem itself.

So I enter the other cutters head

when I figure out the exact angles and indices

that he used, and also with some of the bigger diamonds,

especially in the back of the stone,

the faceting's not perfect.

Whether it's because the owner of the diamond

is looking over the shoulder,

they want it done quickly.

So they'll push a facet to kind of bend it.

So it's not flat, it's not perfect anymore.

Or sometimes they'll push a facet

so that they're not cutting away as much material

so they can make sure the stone still weighs

just over a hundred karats.

I love those irregularities and if they've pushed a facet,

I put it in also.

So we're in my inner sanctum studio, my faceting table,

my array of gems around me.

This is the epicenter of my work.

So here comes a little gem creation.

I think the tools of my trade versus a number of my friends,

most of them are jewelers, mine's really basic.

My studio is really only this big

and it's just the faceting machine.

The wheels, the head, the powders, the oils.

But it's all very compartmentalized and organized.

[gentle music]

Usually when I facet a replica,

it takes me at least six months.

I'm extremely slow

and I'm extremely precise with what I do.

So there's two real components to the faceting machine.

One is the head,

which is the gem is glued onto a stick

and inserted into the head.

And the other part of the faceting machine

is the wheel or the lap.

And what you do is do you have the stone

intersect with the lap

And so, the two ways you can regulate that

is the angle that the facet hits the lap.

And then if you turn the stone like this,

and you can lock it into place,

hundreds of different, you know,

you can split hairs in terms of where the indice

intersects the wheel.

So it's those two, the angle and the indice.

Thank God it's a video, 'cause without my arm movement

people have no idea what I've explained.

The final step on making a replica

is you've finally polished everything.

Usually the last facet I finished, is the largest one,

the table on top of the stone.

And at that point,

I've got to get it off of the stick, off of the DOP stick.

And at that point,

I'm kind of gasping because I can look at it

in the most critical of lights

and see that it has a beautiful polish and it's done.

In replicating diamonds,

I think there's just been three instances

where I had to start over, because if you cut below

what the mass of the actual diamond is,

then it can't be a perfect replica anymore.

So it's just scrap heap.

My access to famous diamonds can take a long time.

The Dresden Green Diamond, for example,

took me five years to get my hands on it.

The Koh-i-Noor diamond in London,

that took me 13 years before I got permission to work on it

'cause there was a certain diamond I was chasing.

Now, when I'm lucky enough to have someone

commission me to make a replica of a famous diamond,

I always travel to the diamond.

It's never brought here to the studio.

So the Hope Diamond,

of all the gems that I've been able to work on,

this my most favorite of all.

And I've worked with it dozens of times.

So the Hope Diamond has three iterations.

This is the first one.

This is a copy and this is a color test.

One of many to get the right color.

So when this arrived,

Tavernier, one of the generally famous diamond merchants,

he made six voyages to India.

The last one, he came back,

had an audience with Louis XIV,

and he sold him a huge diamond crystal.

It was referred to vaguely as a heart-shaped stone,

but you can see that it resembles

more of a crystal in shape.

So what happened about four years

after Louis XIV brought this,

it was fashioned, it was recut.

And we have here the second iteration.

This weighs about 65 karats.

So this is one of the six stones in the six-year period

that I've created for the Smithsonian.

The crystal was actually very thin.

It's so thin that no matter how you cut it,

light will go right through it,

which you want to avoid in any stone

'cause it decreases the brilliancy.

But what they devised is Louis the XIV, the Sun King,

his colors were blue and gold.

On the back of this, you can see there's seven-rayed sun.

The diamond obviously is blue.

And because it's dead in the center,

the light doesn't reflect through it,

they had gold behind it.

And that seven-rayed sun was projected.

So it became the symbol of his reign.

It was the gold sun in blue sky.

So then with the Hope Diamond, and this is a bit odd,

I said how when I work with the process of my replica work,

someone hands me a diamond, I make a mold of it,

I make a cast of it.

This is one of the casts taken from the actual Hope.

So this is a hundred percent accurate in terms of its size.

For whatever reason I gold plated it.

If you set this next to it,

it was a six-year project for the six gems

and completely a life dream of mine to accomplish.

[Interviewer] So when someone gets to look up close

at a replication that you've spent so much time on,

what do you hope they take away from the experience?

So, I mean, look at this.

So this is a piece of Chrysocolla from New Mexico.

It was mine in the 80's.

It's an aura of copper.

What I look at this, a mineral specimen

amongst thousands of others that I have around,

I can't believe that it exists.

Say it's like looking at a flower,

but you compare the beauty of a flower and a gem

and that mortal beauty is the efemoral.

You have the second type of beauty that will last forever

that makes it resonate in a different manner.

So when I look at something like this,

I'm really in awe that it exists

and that I get to take something that's already perfect,

but make so it's my version of perfect

by alternative, somehow.

This is a large part of my aspiration as an artist.

[gentle music]