A Shining Success

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, many lovers’ thoughts turn hopefully to diamonds. For those caught up in romance, the stones are a sparkling symbol of commitment.

For the people who work with jewels day in and day out, however, the gems are just another day’s work.

Here in Los Angeles, in the city’s growing diamond industry, one of the country’s most accomplished diamond cutters--and one of its most unlikely--toils at a cluttered workbench in Beverly Hills.

Cesar Revas is a 44-year-old native of the Dominican Republic who arrived in the United States more than 20 years ago with minimal training in the field.

“At this level of diamond cutting, Cesar is absolutely unique,” said his employer, Jacques Mouw, a fifth-generation diamond trader and owner of Beverly Hills-based Jacques Mouw Precious Jewels. “The diamond-cutting industry has been dominated by Antwerp [Belgium] and New York for large, valuable stones. Traditionally, it’s been the very religious Jewish people, mainly the Hasidim, in New York. In 37 years of being in this business, I have never come across another major diamond cutter who was Latino. Cesar lifted himself up, through his enormous skill, from semiautomatic piece work, where it’s virtually automated and there’s no artistry.”

Revas, who lives in North Hollywood, got into the jewelry business at age 21 in the Dominican Republic through a friend who managed a diamond factory. His first job in the field paid $11 a week. Later, Revas worked as a maritime mechanic and jumped ship in New Orleans. That same friend from home was in L.A., managing Mouw’s diamond factory, and again lined up a diamond cutting job for Revas.

“If not for that friend,” Revas said, “I might still be working on ships.”

When he was hired in September 1980, Revas was one of among dozens of cutters employed by the firm, but Revas soon proved himself a cut above.

“He grasped the facts quickly, and he worked faster and more precisely,” Mouw said. “I could tell that Cesar had a knack, a finer ability to do more with the stones than any other cutters. He possessed an unusual ability to see the finished stone within a rough diamond.

“I have no qualms about giving any stone to Cesar, absolutely no worries.”

And when he says any stone, Mouw means business: Revas previously cut the California Grand Yellow I and II, which are among the world’s largest specimens of Fancy Yellow diamonds--and the largest ever cut in the United States outside of New York. (One is 42 carats, slightly larger than a ping pong ball.) And he recently cut an even more significant stone--one of the largest pink diamonds in the world. It took two months of planning and execution to convert the raw material, mined in Brazil, into 18.33 carats of emerald-cut perfection with an estimated value of $10 million. The stone is slightly smaller than a Scrabble tile and a deep, resonant pink.

Cesar had a tough job, Mouw explains, because of the complexity of the occlusions in the raw stone and the difficulty of maximizing the color.

“The imperfections [were] taken out, and the stone is now flawless,” said Mouw of the as-yet-unnamed gem.

At work, Revas sits in his small room, hunched over a turntable covered with diamond dust. He holds a stone in a clamp and carefully presses it against the rough surface to cut the individual facets, all of which are planned before the cutting begins.

“Cesar can cut a stone from beginning to end,” said Mouw, who helped teach him. “He has a picture of the stone in his head.” While Revas had only rudimentary skills when he arrived, now people send diamonds from as far away as Hong Kong for him to cut. “It took three to four years of learning on the job in United States,” said Revas, “to become good at cutting. I learn more every day.”

Though one miscalculation or slip of the hand can reduce a million-dollar gem to worthless dust in a fraction of a second, Revas, who has never had an accident, is calm and even tempered.

Revas, father of a 13-year-old son, doesn’t live a flashy life. Heavy set and round-faced, he wears no jewelry at all, and favors jeans and a T-shirt at work. He allows himself only a single beer or so on a rare Saturday night, and won’t go near a cup of coffee any day of the week; he needs to protect his extraordinarily steady hands.

And though he handles stones worth millions of dollars every day, Revas’ wife wears only a relatively small 0.36 carat stone in her wedding band.

While his wife may be content with her ring, many other women probably wouldn’t mind finding her husband’s latest work tied up in a bow on Feb. 14.