DIAMOND GIRL MAKES ‘EM SPARKLE
By Paul Luke
The Province
February 3, 2010 1:07 AM
Jeannine masters the art of releasing the fire from a dull stone’s
heart;
They call her diamond girl.
Jeannine Pilon, who became Canada’s first certified female diamond
polisher in 2005, plies one of the trickiest trades in the country.
She brings dead stones to life and teaches them to sing.
Pilon, who calls Yellowknife home, insists the art of lapidary
vivification is no big mystical deal.
You simply peer into a rough stone’s heart and see the shape of the
life it wants, she says.
The rest is applying the technical skills acquired through years of
classroom training and apprenticeship with global masters.
"I visualize the diamond before I begin to polish," says Pilon, 38.
"You need to release the beauty trapped in a stone. When you have
all the facets lined up properly you get the utmost brilliance,
fire and scintillation.
"The stone will look like it’s alive."
Pilon has been demonstrating her art this week as part of a showcase
for the Northwest Territories at Canada’s Northern House at West
Hastings and Seymour in Vancouver.
The territories have become the world’s third-largest producer of
rough-cut diamonds, after Botswana and Russia.
Pilon spent her 20s caring for the terminally ill in her hometown of
Sudbury, Ont.
After moving to Yellowknife, she signed up for a diamond-polishing
program at Aurora College, apprenticed with an Armenian master cutter
and has never looked back.
As far as her gender, she’s a diamond-in-the-rough in a sector still
dominated by men. Pilon knows of only two other female polishers
in Canada.
Last year’s global recession handed the diamond polishing-cutting
business its share of challenges as some facilities closed or
downsized.
Pilon thrives on the painstaking process of polishing — a process
that may oblige her to take "a couple of thousand" separate looks
at a single stone. "You don’t have room for error," she says. "The
symmetry has to be straight all the time."
One of Pilon’s heroines is Eira Thomas, the Vancouver-based geologist
who led the team that discovered the deposit that turned into the
Diavik diamond mine. Pilon would love to meet Thomas while she’s
in town.
"I idolize her. I can wear diamonds that I polish but she can wear
diamonds from her own discovery."
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