Reject
Reject
The trade term for stones returned for re-work, downgrade, or sale at off-cut prices
In coloured-stone and diamond cutting parlance, a reject is a stone that has failed initial quality assessment after cutting and is returned to the cutter for rework, downgraded into a lower commercial tier, or sold at steep discounts as off-cuts or fixers. The term is operational rather than technical: it describes a stone's commercial status at a given point in the cutting and grading workflow rather than a fixed gemmological property. A stone graded as a reject by one buyer may be graded as a saleable lower-tier stone by another, depending on price expectations and downstream market.
What causes a reject
Stones are typically rejected for one or more of the following: inclusions discovered during faceting that were not visible in the rough; symmetry faults in the cut; polishing damage at corners and culet; depth or proportion deviations that affect optical performance; chips, abrasions, or fractures introduced during cutting; and colour weaknesses that were less apparent in the rough than in the finished stone. The mix of causes depends on the cutting centre, the species, and the grade band the cutter is targeting; rejects in a high-end Burmese ruby workflow look very different from rejects in a commercial Brazilian amethyst workflow.
Rework and downgrade
A reject can sometimes be re-worked into a saleable smaller stone by re-polishing or re-cutting. The classic case is a ruby in which a near-surface inclusion can be polished out at the cost of weight; the reworked stone moves down a size band but recovers commercial value. Alternatively, the reject can be downgraded into the next lower tier of the cutting centre's price list and sold at the corresponding price. Some larger cutting houses operate dedicated rework benches that handle rejects from the main production lines.
Off-cuts and fixers
Stones that cannot be reworked profitably are sold as off-cuts or fixers — terms used in the trade to describe rough-like material with one or more facets cut, sold to specialists who will re-orient and re-cut the material into a usable cabochon, smaller faceted stone, or melee. The off-cut market is informal and price-sensitive, and most participants are specialist cutters working in volume.
In the trade
Reject categorisation is internal to cutting houses and does not normally appear on commercial documentation. A finished commercial stone in the consumer market is rarely described to the buyer as a former reject; what was a reject in cutting becomes simply a lower-grade commercial stone in retail. The term is most commonly heard in trade conversations between cutters, dealers, and graders rather than in front of the customer.