Andin Solid 10K White Gold Cushion Cut Blue Topaz Ring with Diamonds - Size 8

Andin International solid 10K white gold ring set with a cushion cut blue topaz, square blue topaz side stones and diamond accents, marked 10K with the Andin maker's mark. The center stone is cut with a checkerboard crown, meaning the top is faceted into a grid of small squares rather than the traditional arrangement of larger facets, which breaks the surface into dozens of independent reflections instead of a few broad ones. Flanking it on each side is a vertical channel of small round diamonds set into a raised white gold bar, then a square cut blue topaz, then further diamonds channel set into the shoulders. Viewed from the side, the gallery beneath the center stone is pierced with openwork scrollwork rather than left solid.

The three stone blue topaz progression is what gives the ring its width on the hand. Rather than isolating one large stone and dropping straight to a plain band, the design steps down in stages, cushion to square to the diamond channels in the shank, so the color carries most of the way across the finger before it resolves. The diamond bars between the blue stones do the separating, keeping each topaz reading as its own shape instead of merging into one blue mass.

Size 8.

Verifications:
Solid 10K gold has been verified using an Auracle Gold Analyzer.
Diamonds have been verified using a Presidium Adamas Diamond Tester, which specifically distinguishes diamonds from moissanite.
Blue topaz has been verified using a Presidium Gem Tester II.

Details:
Maker: Andin International
Metal: Solid 10K White Gold
Hallmarks: 10K, Andin maker's mark with copyright symbol
Center Stone: Blue Topaz
Center Stone Cut: Cushion with checkerboard crown
Side Stones: Square cut Blue Topaz, one per side
Accent Stones: Diamond
Diamond Setting: Channel
Gallery: Openwork scrollwork
Ring Size: 8
Condition: Excellent estate condition

Fun Facts:
One of the people who built this company was a Buddhist monk. Geshe Michael Roach helped found Andin International in 1981 and was ordained as a Gelugpa monk at Sera Monastery in South India two years later, after which he spent seventeen years commuting from a monastery in New Jersey to a diamond trading office in Manhattan. He was vice president by the time he left in 1999, and he afterward wrote The Diamond Cutter, a book on running a jewelry business according to Buddhist principles that became a bestseller and is still in print more than two decades later.
Andin went from a loan to a Berkshire Hathaway company in under thirty years. Ofer and Aya Azrielant started it in New York in 1981 with fifty thousand dollars of borrowed money and three employees. Annual turnover reached roughly one hundred million dollars by 1999 and passed two hundred million by 2009, which is the year Warren Buffett's Richline Group acquired it. The maker's mark inside this shank belongs to that run.