I’d never heard of a diamond going into “surgery”, so when I was invited to watch a massive 5-carat pink diamond worth $3.2 million go under the knife (aka, diamond cutting wheel), I was more than a little curious.
“One wrong move and the stone could just shatter, then millions of dollars right down the drain”, Scott West tells me as he looks at a bright pink diamond in the palm of his hand.
The thought of shattering such a perfect gem makes me cringe, but Scott West knows what he’s doing. He and his dad, Larry West, are the father-son duo who run L.J. West Diamonds, a wholesale diamond house in New York City that’s been around for 41 years. The Wests are known as ‘diamantaires’ in the industry, experts whose primary business is sourcing and cutting rare colored diamonds.