There are two ways to put a row of diamonds into a ring, and they look almost identical in a photo. One is quick. The other is done by hand, one stone at a time. The difference doesn't always show on day one — but it shows over the years you actually wear the piece.
This is the quiet trade-off behind a lot of fine jewellery, and it's worth understanding before you buy. It comes down to when the stone setting happens: before casting, or after.
The fast way: setting stones in wax before casting
Most jewellery starts life as a wax model. In the "stones-in-place" or cast-in-place method, the maker pushes the stones into that wax before the metal is poured. The wax is then burned out and molten gold or platinum is cast directly around the stones in a single lost wax casting cycle. When it comes out, the stones are already "set" — no bench jeweller needed to seat them afterwards.
It's easy to see why this method is popular. For a piece with a lot of stones — a full eternity ring, say — hand-setting every stone is slow and expensive. Casting them all in one go removes hours of skilled labour. It's faster, it's cheaper, and at a glance the result can look perfectly fine.
The problem is what you can't see at a glance.
Why the shortcut costs you later
Casting metal around a stone is a violent process. The stone has to survive being buried in wax, blasted in a burnout oven, and then surrounded by metal heated past 1,000°C. A few things tend to go wrong:
The metal shrinks as it cools. Gold and platinum contract on cooling, and that contraction pulls unevenly around each stone. Some stones end up gripped too tightly and stressed; others end up slightly loose the day they leave the workshop.
Porosity hides around the stones. Gas and shrinkage can leave tiny voids in the metal exactly where you need it most — in the little beads or prongs holding each stone. You can't polish that away, and it's the first place a setting fails.
Heat can damage the stones themselves. Only certain stones tolerate casting temperatures, and even those can pick up internal stress, cloudiness, or fine fractures that weren't there before.
Alignment is left to chance. Once the stones are locked in wax, no one is adjusting them. Sit a cast-in-place row under magnification and you'll often see stones at slightly different heights and angles, tilting the light in different directions.
None of this necessarily fails on the first wear. But cast-in-place pieces are the ones more likely to drop a stone a year or two in — and because the stone was locked into the original casting, repairs are fiddlier too.
The artisan way: one stone at a time
Traditional stone setting flips the order. The metal is cast first — solid, clean, and stone-free. Then a bench jeweller cuts a precise seat for each stone and sets them one at a time, whether that's a prong setting, a bead-set line, or a pavé setting.
That "one at a time" part is the whole point. For every single stone, the setter is:
Cutting a seat sized to that exact stone's girdle, so it sits at the right depth. Checking the height and angle against its neighbours so the row reads as one clean line. Working metal that's already solid and inspected — no hidden porosity — so the beads and prongs holding the stone are actually sound. Confirming each stone is locked before moving to the next.
It's slower and it costs more, and there's no way around that. Skilled hand-setting is genuinely hours of a trained person's attention. But you're paying for two things that matter: durability and brilliance. Hand-cut seats let light travel under and through each stone, so the piece is brighter — and every stone is individually secured rather than trusting one casting to have gone perfectly.
How to tell the difference
You usually can't from a listing photo, which is exactly why the shortcut is so common. But you can ask. A maker who hand-sets will tell you plainly, because it's the harder, prouder choice. Some other tells:
Look closely (a jeweller's loupe helps) at a row of stones. Hand-set stones tend to sit at a consistent height with clean, deliberate beads or prongs. Cast-in-place rows more often show slightly uneven seating and softer, less defined metalwork around each stone. And simply ask the question: "Are the stones hand-set after casting, or cast in place?" The answer tells you a lot about how the piece was made — and how long it's built to last.
Where we stand at Lucano
We think an eternity ring is the wrong place to save an hour. It's a piece meant to be worn every day, often for decades, with more stones exposed to knocks than almost anything else you own. That's the piece that most needs each stone individually seated and secured — not trusted to a single pour of metal.
So our stone setting is done the slow way, by hand, one stone at a time. It's why our pieces cost what they do, and it's the part of the work you'll only really appreciate in year ten. If you'd like to see it up close, have a look at our eternity collection — a full band of stones is the honest test of whether a piece was hand-set or simply cast and hoped for.
Fast is easy to sell. Made properly is easy to wear for a lifetime. When it's jewellery you'll never take off, that's the trade worth making.
