SB x TOP NOTCH FACETING
Discover Sophie’s new collaboration with Jean-Noel Soni, aka Top Notch Faceting.
With his uniquely shaped and faceted precious gemstones, Jean Noel Soni has built himself a reputation as one of the most innovative stone cutters in the jewellery industry today.
In our exciting, new Top Notch Faceting collaboration, Sophie has designed four retro platinum and gold cocktail rings featuring Madagascan green and blue sapphires, a Tanzanian garnet and a red Vietnamese spinel. Each stone has been set with a diamond halo to capture the unique shapes within Jean-Noel’s work.
Jean-Noel is completely self-taught and takes what most dealers and cutters would see as imperfections and creates extraordinary-shaped stones that maximise the potential of the raw material. Often, his stones play with a graduation of colours and hues. It is this signature style that inspired Sophie to suggest a collaboration.
Sophie and Jean-Noel met around five years ago via a chance social media post that led Sophie to reach out to him after becoming fascinated by his work. Sophie has a great appreciation and understanding of a jeweller’s raw materials and could quickly see how special Top Notch’s stones were.
Jean-Noel travels to remote countries and sources all the raw materials himself, often directly from the mines. He has a unique way of cutting gems with an open culet, which is a characteristic most commonly associated with antique stones. Jean-Noel’s stones are a far cry from what can be found on the UK market, where traditional dealers may see his choice of colour hues and alternate shapes as less than perfect. Instead, these have become his signature style.
Sophie and Jean-Noel’s friendship has since turned into a long-term design collaboration. After a 2019 trip to Tucson, Sophie was inspired to use some of Top Notch’s latest stones for a new capsule ring collection of four pieces.
Sophie’s design ethos is to create future heirlooms. The bombe shape of the Top Notch rings is reminiscent of the antique styles she loves so much. After much exploration and design development with alternate setting styles and mounts, this shape became the perfect base for the collection. A finely shaped bezel setting and slim diamond halo contrast with the generous curves of the bombe shape, perfectly capturing the uniqueness of these one-of-a-kind gemstones.
