Press Releases 
December 2001
To: All Media

New scientific cutting method
Lets diamonds achieve 100% brilliance

Santa Rosa, California-A new method of diamond cutting which ensures that every stone attains maximum brilliance is turning this 500-year-old art, based on educated guesswork, into a precision science.
    Using an instrument called a FireScope™, cutters at EightStar Diamond Company, north of San Francisco, align facets with a precision impossible to achieve with eye and hand alone. As a result of such precision, every EightStar diamond-even the tiniest engagement stone-excels in the brilliance (white light) and fire (spectral colors) that experts consider the two most important elements of diamond beauty. "Cutting is what makes a diamond beautiful-not its carat weight, color or clarity," says Richard von Sternberg, EightStar's president. "For the first time, the FireScope makes it possible to look inside a diamond and correct any problems that prevent it from attaining 100% brilliance."
    Although EightStar has used the FireScope to cut every diamond it has produced since opening for business in 1990, the world at large has been slow to acknowledge its achievements. Only since 1997 have EightStar's many contributions to the advancement of diamond cutting been recognized. One of the most important of these tributes came from the prestigious Gemological Institute of America (GIA) in 1998.
    During the 1990s, GIA conducted a multi-million dollar study of diamond cutting for which they created a 'perfect' three-dimensional diamond using a computer. To see if any actual diamonds matched their virtual one for perfection of symmetry and proportions, they looked at 68,000 stones. GIA found only one real-world diamond-an EightStar-that matched their computer model and they cited this fact in a study they published in 1998. A year later, researcher Ilene Reinitz, who oversaw the study, publicly declared that "EightStar diamonds have phenomenal symmetry"-a symmetry, she said, that was "the best approximation" of GIA's computer-generated 'perfect' diamond.
    In short, the EightStar diamond was the only one in the world that GIA could find that was cut to standards as high as those it used to create a perfect computer-generated diamond.

Attaining and proving maximum brilliance
Besides being the first scientific instrument to help cutters achieve 100% brilliance in every diamond, the FireScope is the first scientific means to prove perfection of cutting.
Put simply, the FireScope is a light-tracking instruments that tells both cutters and consumers if a diamond is reflecting light back to the eye or leaking it out the sides. For a round-brilliant diamond to have 100% brilliance, every one of its 58 facets must be perfectly aligned so that light follows a proper path into and out of the stone. Such a diamond makes a distinctive 8-rayed light-reflection pattern in the FireScope called an 'EightStar' that serves as visual proof that a diamond is capable of maximum brilliance. Often this pattern can be seen by the naked eye-even in dim light. Indeed, says von Sternberg, "One of the tests of an EightStar diamond is its ability to perform at peak levels of brilliance and fire in low lighting that robs other diamonds of their glow."
  

    For more information on EightStar Diamond Company and the FireScope, visit EightStar's web site www.eightstar.com.
    Note to editors: Von Sternberg available for interviews. Photos, head shot and B-roll available. Contact press@eightstar.com