Every week someone asks whether polki is a real diamond. It is — completely. What it is not is a cut diamond, and the difference is the whole story.
A diamond before Europe got hold of it
A brilliant-cut diamond is a piece of engineering. Fifty-seven facets are ground onto the stone at angles calculated to bounce light back at your eye. It sparkles because a mathematician told it to. To get there, roughly half the original crystal is ground away as dust.
Polki is the same crystal, left as it came out of the ground and merely cleaved and polished on its natural planes. Nothing is thrown away. It does not flash — it glows, in a soft, uneven, candle-lit way, because the light is passing through an unedited stone.
The foil behind it
Look at the back of a good polki piece and you will find a thin sheet of silver foil behind each stone. Before electric light, that foil was how a jeweller made an uncut diamond carry a room. It reflects whatever light reaches the stone back through it. It is also the reason you must never put a polki piece in an ultrasonic cleaner or a silver dip — the liquid gets behind the foil, and once it is behind there, the stone goes dead.
Why it costs what it costs
Polki is priced by weight and clarity like any diamond, but the labour sits somewhere else entirely. A setter places each stone into a soft lac core and works the surrounding metal over its edge by hand, one stone at a time. A single Victorian ring can be two days at the bench. You are buying the hours as much as the carats.
How to tell good from careless
- Turn the piece over. The back of a well-made jadau piece is finished, not raw — often more beautiful than the front.
- Stones should sit level with each other, with the metal worked evenly around every edge.
- Under a loupe you should see natural inclusions. A flawless "polki" is glass.
Every polki piece we sell is set this way, by hand, at our bench in Jaipur. See the current rings →