The inverted setting is the defining technical and aesthetic signature of Brazilian jeweller Ara Vartanian, in which a faceted gemstone is mounted with its pavilion — the lower, pointed or keel-shaped portion of the stone — facing outward toward the viewer, rather than inward toward the skin as in all conventional settings. The crown, normally the face-up display surface, is instead nestled against the metal or the wearer's body. Light enters through the pavilion facets, travels through the body of the stone, and exits diffused and coloured, producing an effect that Vartanian and critics have consistently compared to illuminated stained glass. Introduced in the early 2000s and refined across subsequent decades, the inverted setting has earned Vartanian a singular position in contemporary high jewellery: a maker whose central innovation is not a new alloy, a new cut, or a new source, but a deliberate inversion of the optical logic that has governed gem-setting since the Renaissance.

The Conventional Logic Being Overturned

To appreciate what the inverted setting achieves, it is necessary to understand what it departs from. In standard gem-setting practice — whether in a prong, bezel, channel, or pavé mount — the crown of a faceted stone faces upward. The crown's table facet and surrounding star and bezel facets are engineered to collect ambient light, direct it through the stone, and return it to the eye as brightness, dispersion, and scintillation. The pavilion, angled according to the critical angle of the material, acts as a system of internal mirrors, bouncing light back out through the crown. This is the optical architecture that underlies the brilliance of a well-cut diamond or sapphire.

The pavilion, in conventional jewellery, is a hidden working surface — functional, precise, but never intended to be seen. It faces the skin or the interior of the mount. Its facets are ground to exacting angles not for visual display but for optical performance. Vartanian's inversion exposes this hidden geometry to the world and, in doing so, transforms the stone's optical behaviour entirely. Rather than reflecting light back toward the viewer, the stone now transmits it. The result is not brilliance in the gemmological sense — the return of light from within — but luminosity in a more painterly sense: colour suspended in depth, glowing from behind as if self-lit.

Technical Execution

Executing an inverted setting demands a reconsideration of the mount from first principles. In a conventional prong setting, the prongs grip the girdle — the narrow equatorial band separating crown from pavilion — and the stone sits securely with its table parallel to the plane of the jewel. In Vartanian's inverted approach, the crown is recessed into or cradled by the metal, and the prongs or bezel walls must be redesigned to grip the girdle from the opposite orientation, holding the pavilion proud of the setting's surface.

This creates several engineering challenges. The pavilion of a standard brilliant-cut stone terminates in a culet — a small point or very small flat facet — which, when exposed, becomes a potential point of vulnerability. Vartanian's workshop has addressed this through careful choice of stone geometry, custom cutting specifications, and mount designs that offer the culet some degree of protection without obscuring the optical effect. The prong placement must account for the fact that the widest visual profile of the stone, when inverted, is no longer the table but the spread of the pavilion facets, which taper inward rather than outward.

The metal work surrounding an inverted stone also performs a different visual function than in conventional jewellery. Because the stone's face-up surface (now facing the skin) is the crown — typically the most elaborately faceted part of the stone — the metal must frame the pavilion in a way that complements its geometry without competing with the transmitted colour. Vartanian's settings frequently use blackened or oxidised silver and gold, which absorb rather than reflect light and thus intensify the apparent luminosity of the coloured stone by contrast.

Gemstone Selection and the Role of Transparency

The inverted setting is not equally effective with all gem materials. Its optical premise depends on the stone transmitting light rather than reflecting it, which means that high transparency is essential. Heavily included stones, or those with strong colour saturation that approaches opacity, will absorb too much of the transmitted light and appear dark rather than luminous. Conversely, very pale stones may transmit light without imparting sufficient colour to create the stained-glass effect.

The gem materials most associated with Vartanian's inverted work include:

• Tourmaline — particularly the vivid greens, indicolites, and bi-colour specimens from Brazilian pegmatites, which combine high transparency with saturated, complex colour. The Paraíba-type copper-bearing tourmalines of Brazil and Mozambique, with their neon luminosity, are especially effective when inverted, as their colour is intrinsic to the crystal structure and performs brilliantly under transmitted light.
• Aquamarine — the pale-to-medium blue beryl variety, whose high clarity and relatively low refractive index (approximately 1.577–1.583) make it an excellent transmitter of light. Large, clean aquamarines from Brazilian deposits such as Santa Maria de Itabira have featured prominently in Vartanian's collections.
• Emerald — a more demanding choice given the species' characteristic inclusions (jardin), but fine, transparent Colombian or Brazilian emeralds, when inverted, display their green in a manner that is softer and more suffused than the face-up brilliance of a conventional mount. The inclusions, rather than detracting, can scatter transmitted light in ways that enhance the stained-glass analogy.
• Morganite and other beryls — the pink-to-peach morganite variety, with its typically high clarity and gentle colour, translates well to the inverted format.
• Amethyst and other quartzes — lower-value but optically suitable, used in more accessible pieces within the Vartanian range.

Notably, diamond — the gem around which virtually all Western fine-jewellery convention has been organised — is rarely the centrepiece of an inverted Vartanian setting. Diamond's optical performance is predicated almost entirely on the reflection and dispersion of light, not its transmission. Inverted, a diamond would appear largely colourless and relatively inert. Vartanian's technique is, in this sense, a deliberate repositioning of coloured gemstones to the centre of the high-jewellery conversation — a statement about colour and translucency as primary values, rather than brilliance and fire.

Aesthetic Lineage and Cultural Context

Vartanian, who was born in São Paulo to an Armenian family and trained in part in Europe before establishing his studio in Brazil, has cited stained-glass windows — particularly those of Gothic cathedrals — as a formative visual reference. The comparison is apt in a technical sense: stained glass achieves its luminosity not by reflecting ambient light but by transmitting and colouring it, so that the viewer perceives the light source itself, filtered and transformed, rather than a surface illuminated from without. The inverted gemstone performs the same optical role on a miniature scale.

There is also a broader cultural dimension to the technique's emergence from Brazil. São Paulo's contemporary art and design scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s was characterised by a willingness to engage with materials in unconventional ways, and Brazil's extraordinary gemstone wealth — the country is among the world's leading producers of tourmaline, aquamarine, emerald, topaz, and alexandrite — gave Vartanian access to a range of coloured stones that a European or American jeweller might not have encountered with the same intimacy. The inverted setting can be read, in part, as a Brazilian jeweller's assertion that the country's coloured gemstones deserve a setting vocabulary of their own, one that foregrounds their specific optical qualities rather than subordinating them to conventions developed around European diamonds.

Reception in the High-Jewellery Market

The inverted setting attracted significant international attention in the mid-2000s, when Vartanian's work began appearing at international jewellery fairs and in the editorial pages of publications covering contemporary design and luxury. The technique was recognised as genuinely novel — not a stylistic variation on existing practice but a structural rethinking of how a stone relates to its mount and to the viewer's eye. It earned Vartanian a reputation as one of the more intellectually rigorous designers working in high jewellery, a field in which genuine technical innovation is relatively rare.

Within the trade, the inverted setting prompted discussion about valuation and grading. A stone selected for an inverted mount may be assessed differently than one destined for a conventional setting: face-up appearance matters less, while transparency, body colour under transmitted light, and the geometry of the pavilion facets become primary considerations. This has implications for how stones are purchased, cut, and described — a facet of the technique's influence that extends beyond the finished jewel into the supply chain.

Collectors and clients drawn to Vartanian's work tend to be those with an existing interest in coloured gemstones and contemporary design, and the pieces have been acquired by collectors in Brazil, Europe, and the United States. The jewels sit at the intersection of fine jewellery and wearable sculpture, and they are often discussed in design contexts as readily as in jewellery contexts — a reflection of the technique's conceptual clarity.

Influence and Legacy

The inverted setting has not been widely replicated by other major jewellery houses, which is itself a measure of its distinctiveness: it is closely enough associated with Vartanian that imitation would read as direct borrowing. However, its influence can be detected in a broader willingness among contemporary high-jewellery designers to question the face-up orientation of gemstones and to experiment with transmitted rather than reflected light as a design resource. The technique has also contributed to renewed critical attention to the optical properties of coloured gemstones in the context of setting design — a conversation that had been relatively dormant in an industry long dominated by the metrics of diamond grading.

Within Vartanian's own body of work, the inverted setting has remained a constant rather than a phase. It appears across rings, earrings, pendants, and bracelets, in single-stone and multi-stone compositions, and in pieces that range from relatively restrained to architecturally complex. The consistency of its application across two decades of production suggests that it functions for Vartanian not merely as a signature device but as a genuine philosophical commitment — a position on what jewellery is for and what gemstones, at their best, can do.

Further Reading

• Gems & Gemology — GIA's peer-reviewed quarterly (gia.edu)
• AGTA Gemstone Encyclopedia (agta.org)