If it wasn’t to burn a crawling ant under the sun, everyone has used at least once in a lifetime a loupe. The kind your hold in your hands like a grandma would use to decipher an address on an envelop or the one watchmakers stick in one eye to work on their minuscule components.

Author By Eleonor picciotto

Spending time on a detail of your watch or jewelry is a lot of fun with the appropriate equipment.

The loupe is the most important tool for the jewelry industry permitting to examine under a magnification of 10 the variety of metals or stones.

The portability and small size allow the loupe to be easily carried around. Widely offered during press launches, cocktail goody bags, or as a small gift upon a sale, branded loupes are as common as they are useful.

However, there are two varieties of loupes: the hand loupe and the eye loupe that can be compared to a monocle. The most important is to have three lenses joined together to get rid of any distortion…

In any case, the loupe has to stay static when you look at your stone and both of your eyes have the remain open: only the stone moves back and forth. Not you !