Heart of gold in JLT

What is it about this ‘precious’ metal? A tour at Damas means we’re about to find out

Gold has many properties, not least the ability to turn otherwise normal people into beady-eyed treasure seekers or even, the modern-day equivalent of badgering, sulking spouses. For centuries, the yellow — and its white avatar — metal has held millions captive with its shiny allure and even today, people monitor its fluctuating price rates as though they were watching their own heartbeats.

Personally, I’d always thought it much ado about nothing, so for someone who’d never really taken a shine to the metal, now seemed as good a time as ever to take leading jewellery retailer Damas up on its offer of a close-up tour of the process involved. Finally, it seemed, I was about to find out what all the fuss was about.

The main Damas property — located in the uptown Jumeirah Lake Towers area — is hard to miss, with its golden façade an obvious but elegant nod to what one could expect to find inside. We were ushered in to meet Navdeep Singh Sandhu, operations manager at Damas, who would also be doubling as our guide for the day, and excitement buzzed in the air as he explained how today, we’d be watching the team bring rings from their exquisite Heart to Heart collection to life.

We started at the Designers room — and what must have been the birthplace of some of Damas’ most popular creations. Navdeep showed us how the designs were first conceived manually and then rendered using software that let the designers convert the design into a three-dimensional reality, complete with stunning detail. Quite literally, it was like watching an idea take shape.

A wax model was then ‘grown’ using a method called rapid prototyping. The entire process takes about 7-8 hours to actually become a wax model so instead of testing our patience, the considerate folks at Damas had already loaded the ring in a substance called resin the previous night. Having had the night to develop, what emerged now was an unmistakable 3D version of the Heart to Heart ring design we’d been shown earlier (1).

It was on to the Wax room from there, where four men in lab coats worked painstakingly to create the perfect ring moulds (2). Floor to ceiling shelves ran the length and breadth of an entire wall in the room, stocked with hundreds of moulds from previous designs. “Every single design is numbered and stocked, so if a customer wishes to recreate a particular design, all we have to do is base it on the corresponding mould,” said Navdeep. “The moulds are created with 100 per cent precision,” he added, as we watched one of the workers use what looked like a surgical blade to carve out the ring piece. If there is the smallest mistake, we’re reminded, the entire piece is ruined.

The resulting wax ring was fitted onto a tree (3) consisting of about 60-70 other ring pieces, to be taken to the Casting room, where the previous night another prototype had been put into a furnace, heated up to more than 1000ºC, and left overnight for the wax to melt. All of us stood back as the workers prepared to open the electric furnace. When the door was opened, the short blast of searing heat that hit us in the face honestly made Dubai’s summer weather feel like a lightly cooling breeze by comparison. Using huge tongs, the mould was transferred and locked into the casting machine, and flaming liquid gold poured in through a hole at the top (4).

A minute later, the mould was removed and dunked in water. The fizzling mass subsided, the plaster melted and we saw gold — lots of it, shaped like rings and still fixed onto the ‘ring tree’ (5). Each ring was clipped off individually and sent to the goldsmith for polishing, final touches and diamond setting.

Keen not to miss out on the action, we climbed two levels up to the manufacturing department, where we watched as diamonds — millions of the tiny gems — were weighed and bagged in a small room. Finally, the diamonds were set, extra mould stems were filed down and the ring given a final polish (6).

It was looking pretty good to me and if I were a magpie, I wouldn’t have thought twice about swiping the ring in its present state. Navdeep, however, insisted we were not done and we watched, part horrified, as the lovely ring was dunked in fizzling rhodium acid and hosed down with pressurised water. Our concern was unnecessary though for the white gold ring was positively gleaming now and after a careful inspection by the quality control guys (7), given the thumbs-up of approval.

The entire tour lasted about two hours but after watching scores of workers meticulously perfecting hundreds of similar pieces and the toil that went into creating a single Heart to Heart ring, I had to admit: I’m neither magpie nor treasure hunter, but even I could see this little beauty is for keeps.

By Karen Ann Monsy (ALL THAT GLITTERS)

Khaleej Times