Why Not Quartz?
I’ve written about this on various social media platforms and in various lengths for many years. This post is for new faceters who want to progress more quickly, and with less needless confusion and frustration. Those who want their faceting experience to be slower and more frustrating should hide their eyes…
Contrary to popular lore, quartz is NOT a beginner’s material.
What?
Quartz is not brittle, heat-sensitive, optically complicated, nor does it have a cleavage or significant directional hardness. It’s available in large pieces, and most importantly, it’s CHEAP.
Doesn’t that make it an ideal beginner’s material?
Obviously not. Or, I wouldn’t be perennially triggered into the PTSD of my own early-days struggles caused by “start with quartz” – which, in my opinion, isn’t so much “advice” as it is a cruel prank on the noob.
Quartz doesn’t have the mechanical challenges mentioned above. But it does have some issues not mentioned:
- It doesn’t usually play nice with diamond polishes. Right away, this will either create frustration in the beginner trying to work with diamond polish, or it will demand they jump into oxide polishing.
- It has some odd twinning behaviors that can lead to really extreme polishing challenges – even for very experienced artists. While it’s possible to detect some of the problematic twinning – and that’s a useful skill – this does not reliably predict how the individual stone will behave on the lap.
- Like the citrine “beginner material” above, it’s often zoned. While this doesn’t influence the all-too-common polishing issues, managing color zoning is an intermediate-to-advanced skill…
How Humans Learn
We know humans learn best with incremental, bite-sized increases in cognitive load (the variables they must monitor and control). And, the jump from diamond to oxide polish means several new variables to monitor and control. A bunch of stuff about color zoning is more cognitive load – while the student is trying to juggle the variables of polishing with oxide. We know “learning” means connecting actions to outcomes. And, we know the more consistent outcomes are linked to actions the faster understandings are built, and calibrated.
The issue with quartz is the twinning features of the material often lead to inconsistent behavior during polishing. It can confound even highly-skilled faceters: You can “do everything right” and still have maddening problems. That kind of experience is needlessly confusing, frustrating, and demotivating for a beginner, harming their progress in the art.
New students will progress faster if they learn to hit the fast-ball before trying to hit the curve-ball.
Beginners should first learn to manage the added complexities of oxide polishes on materials that offer consistent behavior. For this step, both beryls and feldspar are good options. If they then progress to quartz, until they’re ready to add another layer of complexity, they should select roughs that aren’t zoned in a way that might distract from the more basic tasks.
“But, it’s available in large pieces”:
Beginners who want to build skills quickly should be completing more stones – which is faster and easier with smaller ones. They should be seeking fine-level integration of the feedback they’re getting from their inputs to the faceting instrument. The feel and sound of the stone on the lap. The feedback from their depth-of-cut indicator. Building visual acuity in inspecting meets and polish.
All of these things progress faster by working with smaller stones, where the “completed stone count” metric also moves faster. This builds the skills that directly influence yield, and thereby confidence to work with more expensive materials.
Academy students, and our private coaching students most often work with stones in the range of 3mm to 6mm, with a few specialty projects in the 9mm to 14mm range. If you want to progress your skills (and grow your collection) faster, cut small stones.
“But, quartz is cheap”:
Precious stones are a luxury item. Cutting precious stones is a production-of-luxury-art activity, especially if you are in a high-cost-of-living country, and using modern, high-precision faceting equipment. If you have a multi-thousand-dollar faceting instrument, and your choice of what to feed it is based on “cheap”, your thinking may be backwards. Re-evaluate the worthiness of your ambitions – and probably also how you value your own time and goods.
Quartz may also not be as “cheap” as you think. The internals often found in quartz offered as faceting rough can be quite tricky for beginners to detect. And, quartz is something I pretty much never buy through the mail – because the success rate for that is just incredibly low.
We may use some very cheap – and even free – rough sources, but for their specific training value to build specific skills, not because of their cost. 
Using “cheap” rough because it’s cheap, especially in large pieces, often breeds carelessness at every stage of the art – from rough evaluation, to planning and orientation, to preforming, dopping, cutting, etc. Beginners working with cheap rough, especially large cheap rough, often wind up with habits that lead to habitually poor yield. This leads to anxiety about buying quality rough or tackling projects where yield matters.
Instead, train with small roughs, and buy some costly enough that yield and care matters. The “savings” will be in their small sizes. Cut some tsavorite and demantoid garnets (some of the latter from the Iranian deposit are perfect in both size and price). Cut some Montana sapphire, or smaller ones from Australia or Nigeria. If you buy mid-level quality the price will likely be right to build your confidence along with your precision skills.
Quartz has its place in the art, the shop, and in the progression of the skillset. That place just isn’t at the head of the line.