About Us
Shiny Precious Gems:
Expert Lapidary Services
Shiny Precious Gems provides lapidary services for custom gems and both traditional and unique jewelry pieces. But who’s the team behind SPG, and how did the business come to be?
Meet the Team
The man who started it all! Jim has been interested in rock hounding for a long time, and after many years of amassing specimens, decided to get into cutting. After learning from watching Steve Moriarty’s videos on YouTube and pouring over posts from gemology online forums, Jim developed a passion for precision cutting, often using competition standards to ensure that his facets align under 20x magnification or even higher. This desire for perfection means he averages a longer time per stone, often spending up to 12 hours on one, occasionally even up to 40! Jim started posting his work on Reddit in February of 2019 and quickly developed a following on r/gemstones. Managing all the interest on a general sub soon became unfeasible, so the Shiny Precious Gems subreddit was born. After the subreddit’s massive success, Jim began running the business full-time, and the rest is shiny, beautiful history!
Michelle first fell in love with gemstones as a young child, finding garnets in the crushed granite gravel track at her elementary school and devouring books on crystals and gems.
Over time, her fascination with nature led her to a professional career in biochemistry, food science, and environmental sustainability. Though these fields remain active professional interests for Michelle, she never lost her original zeal for the gemstones that ignited her interest in science.
However, it wasn’t until 2016 that Michelle was introduced to lapidary, the art of gem cutting. She taught herself how to facet with the help of internet and book resources. She found the repetitive flow, tangible product, and immediate gratification (relative to Changing The WorldTM) addicting. In the years since, Michelle cemented her reputation as an accomplished lapidary after cutting thousands of gems, being featured in a museum exhibition, and building a sizable following on her Instagram and Reddit.
As a science nerd, many of Michelle’s signature custom designs derive from concepts such as chemistry and botany. A specialist with smaller and more approachable gems, she coaxes beauty out of any stone she works with by optimizing designs for each gem and improvising where needed.
Some of Michelle’s most technically challenging work was cutting a few dozen <3mm gems for a pocket mineral collection deeded to the Smithsonian, including rarities like painite, dioptase, and blue euclase. But even after faceting dozens of gem types, her favorites are still garnets, earning her the “Mother of Garnets” flair on the SPG subreddit.
In addition, Michelle is passionate about using her gemstone cutting to fundraise for human rights campaigns. Over the past few years, she has raised over $17,000 for issues including women’s reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ advocacy, disaster relief, and the War in Ukraine.
Lisa Elser
Lapidary
Reddit | Instagram | Newsletter
Lisa was looking for an escape from an increasingly stressful corporate life and with her husband’s encouragement, decided to play with rocks. While still working, she built up her gem-cutting skills, Tom built her a database for the business-to-be and learned gem design, and Lisa began outfitting her shop and working on her Graduate Gemologist (GG) training at the Gemological Institute of America (GIA).
She managed to turn what was supposed to be a hobby business into a REAL business, winning awards including the American Gem Trade Association (AGTA) Spectrum Cutting Edge Award, and one of her pieces is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian. Tom, not to be outdone, won first and second place in Lapidary Journal’s 65th Anniversary gem design competition.
What really mattered to them, though, was traveling to the gem-producing countries and trying to give back as much as possible. She and Tom donated 20% of their profits to schools, medical equipment, wells, etc., in Africa and Southeast Asia. They even donated their corporate consulting skills to mining cooperatives in Tanzania.
When Tom was diagnosed with cancer, she started looking for ways to work closer to home instead of traveling to sell her gems. She joined the Shiny team in 2019 and never looked back.
Tom died in early 2021, but Lisa continues to mostly cut his designs and still makes giving back a core part of her business and her life.
Arya Akhavan
Lapidary
Reddit
Arya learned faceting in 2010 at the Arizona Mining and Mineral Museum and taught himself gemstone design shortly after. Since so few designs and educational resources were available, he created a YouTube series and published his designs online for free.
He became heavily involved with regional and national faceting guilds, including writing articles, giving tours of the Tucson gem shows (where he first met Michelle!), and helping with global certifying competitions. He also dove headfirst into the synthetic gem community, including national and international growth labs, research groups, and gemstone testing firms.
The SPG team featured Arya as a guest several times for both gems and educational work, so when Arya managed to leave his toxic former workplace for greener pastures, it was a natural transition to join up with SPG full-time, where he has been having a blast cutting rare and exotic natural and synthetic gems with strong pleochroism, color change, and/or high dispersion, in his own ridiculous custom designs.
Arya currently owns and operates Surgical Precision Gems (accidentally also "SPG"!), a gemcutting and gemological research firm in Canada. He is the lead researcher in the Verneuil Project, a global research venture examining color and dopants in flame-fusion sapphire, spinel, strontium titanate, and rutile. And in his spare time (what spare time?), he is working with several growth labs to produce novel colours of Czochralski and other high-end synthetic sapphires and other materials.
Alissa Manners
Gemologist & Office Manager
Reddit
Since starting to sell her own jewelry at 13, Alissa has known all her life that her career passion lies in gemstones. After working in retail jewelry as an adult, Alissa completed the Graduate Gemologist® program at the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) to collect expert training in identifying, evaluating, and grading gemstones reliably and consistently. After receiving her diploma, Alissa worked as a GIA diamond grader, handling and reviewing diamonds from across the world. She also worked in guest services for the GIA, operating both as a museum tour guide and program instructor of GemKids®, which provides educational resources to foster the next generation of jewelers and gemologists. Alissa loves to share her passion and knowledge of gemstones. So, in addition to evaluating materials, she also writes educational content for SPG.
The SPG Mission: From Rough to Set
Two key objectives guide SPG’s mission:
Producing the highest-quality and highest-performance precision faceted gemstones and jewelry
Fostering a fun and inclusive educational environment to help both new and seasoned gemstone lovers better understand the products that capture their eye
With SPG, our customers can expect hand-cut gems and exceptional attention to detail during the faceting process. Though our cutting process might take longer, it results in facet alignment at highly magnified levels, which supports superior performance. While community building and educating buyers is not for everyone, it's been SPG’s goal and intention from day one to do more than sell shiny rocks. Since no one likes to find out they bought something misleading or way over market price, SPG wants our community to figure out precisely what they want and know exactly what they are getting. Rather than oversell customers, we prefer to inform them and let them come to their own conclusions. You’ll never experience a hard sell here.
On our subreddit and our blog, we want to continue growing a community of lapidaries, buyers, collectors, jewelers, hopeful hobbyists, and those just wanting to stare and learn. We closely curate our posts to ensure that the content meets our quality and ethical standards; that way, we can provide a welcoming environment for people to ask earnest questions and interact with each other.
SPG is so grateful to our customers, supporters, and friends. We intend to keep producing amazing gemstones and jewelry pieces while continuing to grow our beloved community. SPG aims to keep earning the respect and encouragement from our supporters and share it as far as we can.
What is Precision Faceting?
Precision faceting is a style of gemstone cutting that focuses on optimizing the movement of light through the stone and enhancing color. Whereas traditional cutting generally aims to maximize yield to get the largest final stone, precision faceting is all about brilliance and optical performance first, followed after by size. However, executing precision faceting requires skill and patience to execute properly. It takes attention to detail and technical knowledge to understand how to work with the available material and get the most out of it.