What Is A Cabochon

Hi there. In this video, I'm going to tell you all about cabochons. You may have heard the term and wondered what it meant. I'll show you some examples and tell you just exactly what it means. So here in front of me is a collection of cabochons. Now the definition of cabochon might surprise you. It's not just an oval piece that doesn't have a hole drilled through it. It actually means anything that is polished smooth, usually with a dome as opposed to being faceted. So you'll often see stones like turquoise and such opaque stones turned into cabochons where something more transparent, like a ruby or a diamond or something, would be faceted to show off its transparency. Now all of my cabochons are oval, including this one. This is a cabochon opal set into a ring but cabochons don't necessarily have to be oval. They can be square or rectangular, like these. They can be round, like these. They can even be teardrop-shaped or really any shape but, like I said, the definition is they have this smooth top. This one is a polished shell. These ones are just glass that have inclusions to sort of make them look like opals. These little ones are shell and this one is another glass one with inclusions to look like a fire opal. And generally they have a smooth back and then, although this one isn't as domed as the others, most of them have a nice domed shape and they usually don't have a bead-stringing hole. So they need to be set into some sort of bezel like this one. So now you know what you're looking at when you see the term cabochon.

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