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A different but equally powerful epiphany brought Neil Lane to rough diamonds. His took substantially longer to realize. “To be honest, I’d never seen diamonds in the rough, and didn’t much care for them when I did. I had an assistant, Mike, who liked them, though and he brought me to one of those rocks and minerals shows. They looked—I won’t say ugly—but they certainly didn’t look beautiful. Why, I don’t know, but I bought them, north of $10,000 worth, which in those days got you a lot of rough diamond. On the plane back Mike was like, ‘Why did you buy them if you don’t like them?’ And I had no answer. They sat in my safe for years. I’d take them out and look at them, move them around next to each other, greens, ochres, reds, pinkish browns, grays, and gradually began to really enjoy that time with them, particularly the colors.”

Lane had developed a trademark over that time: the celebrity sautoir worn by Hollywood society. These long rope necklaces, longer than operas, and almost always centered on diamonds, were fantastically expensive. “I started laying out some of the rough pieces for sautoirs, and eventually taking them to cutters, to see if they could be laser-drilled and strung, essentially, as beads. I had no desire to prong set these stones. I never wanted to wrap them in platinum wire, as others do, and other forms of wire setting failed. These may be rough, but they are diamonds, and they cut through anything.”

Two or three sautoirs in, Lane realized he’d fallen in love. “As I began treating these stones as precious objects, I started seeing them that way. Once I stopped looking for that shimmer, symmetry, color, polish of faceted diamonds, I saw what depths of color and symmetry these things really had. And so did my clients. They were fascinated. I could string literally hundreds of carats on a necklace like that.”

Unbeknownst to Lane, De Beers had begun its own research into rough jewelry. When the two parties met, for unrelated negotiations, Lane pulled out some of his early sautoirs and drawings. “They were like wow. It had all been top secret with them, and here it was just something I’d basically stumbled upon.” Collections for De Beers New York and Beverly Hills, ensued, and Lane has moved on to a catalog of rough diamond jewelry. A number of the pieces are museum worthy. A typically lavish mogul-style necklace, incorporating a good dozen multi-carat yellows, grays, browns, and reds, sells for roughly $100,000. “Put polished in there, and maybe even my clients couldn’t afford it,” says Lane.

Across town is Samir Bhansali, a third-generation Mumbai-born designer whose La Reina Collection routinely captures awards, such as best design in Couture 2007. He is a fabulist who manages to capture the essence of luxury while spinning out his floral, animal, and geometric menagerie of a jewelry line.

The wonder is that he does it so exactly with rough diamonds, which burst out of his pieces, to the extent that one barely notices the metals. With more significant metal contents, such as anodized titanium, his pieces look like Georgia O’Keefe translated into jewelry. Bhansali tends to use shaved rough—a few millimeter thicknesses of fancy yellow, white, or gray rough taken by laser from flat stones with little graining. He doesn’t shy away from the inclusions, naturals, or lattice deformations that eat at polished prices. Rather, in Bhansali’s world, they become the graining of a butterfly wing or the flow of a petal, a movement often running beside the shadow of the gold trellising at the rear of the piece, visible through once-opaque diamond material made transparent in such thin slivers.

Around these multi-carat rough slivers, he builds and illustrates the frames of his creations, usually incorporating significant caratage of yellow and white melee and wisps of spun and braided gold. Entirely willing to facet a few long bezels into the crowns, for various aesthetic, design, and gemological purposes, in compositions where delicacy is made to tiptoe the finest line with embroidery, Bhansali will often center a piece with a significant polished stone: Nature meeting art at the ideal juncture, market-wise and aesthetically. A “typical” piece has four rough diamond slivers of almost 12 carats, more than five carats of yellow melee, two carats of white melee, and a stunning .64 carat intense yellow pear, retailing at about $114,000.