Kundan setting is the traditional Indian stone-setting method in which gemstones are held in place by a bezel built up from layers of pure 24-karat gold foil hammered cold around the perimeter of the stone. The technique avoids heat, claws, and conventional bezel construction altogether and exploits the cold-malleability of 24-karat gold to bond layer to layer through pressure alone.

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In construction, the body of the piece is a hollow gold shell (typically 22-karat) filled with hardened lac resin. The stone is pressed into the lac while it is soft, and thin gold foil is then hammered around the perimeter, layer by layer, until the bezel achieves its full height. The pure gold foil is burnished into the soft lac layer, creating a smooth, mirror-bright bezel characteristic of kundan work through the adhesive properties of the lac, not through cold-flow bonding of the gold itself.

The setting accommodates stones of any outline, including irregular natural shapes, flat-backed Mughal-cut diamonds, polki, and shallow cabochons that would be difficult to set by Western claw or bezel methods. The piece is heat-sensitive (lac softens at low temperatures) and the bezel is gold-rich rather than alloy-rich, so re-sizing, re-foiling and any repair must be carried out by an Indian-trained kundan specialist rather than a Western bench jeweller.

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