This is one of the few stones whose concept was born after its design was created. Initially, the idea was simply to create the most faceted stone in the world. I'd seen diagrams showing over seven hundred, eight hundred, even a thousand facets, though I didn't know if anyone had actually cut these stones. Just to be on the safe side, I decided to play it safe and create a design with over two thousand facets. The best shape for this was a sphere or... an egg. So I began drawing the first hemisphere, tier by tier. I came to my senses when the number of facets on just one hemisphere had exceeded one and a half thousand. I quickly finished the "polar" region—it turned out to have exactly 1,800 facets! The number seemed beautiful, so I repeated the same design on the second hemisphere, slightly adjusting the angles so it would look like an egg rather than a sphere, and sat down at the machine.
The work on the stone took two months. Two months of total concentration, without distractions or shifting consciousness. And only when the work was already completed did it suddenly dawn on me that 3,600 is the number of seconds in an hour! For a stone, such a number is a very large number. An incredibly large number. But if we think in terms of eternity, what is an hour? Just an insignificant drop… Thus was born the name, expressing the idea of the stone.
I must say that when the cubic zirconia "Hour – A Drop of Eternity" egg was finished, I wanted to replicate it in natural stone. After another two months of work, I looked at these two twins and thought how different these brothers were! The natural egg was made from Madagascar scapolite and entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the most faceted scapolite in the world. It was billed as the most faceted stone, but the Guinness team believed that different materials have different properties, and that applying, say, a thousand facets to a hard sapphire is much easier than to a soft fluorite, so they advised me to limit the record title to one mineral. Looking ahead, I can say that this opened a huge window of opportunity for me, because then came the most faceted quartz, the most faceted peridot…
It's also worth noting that this scapolite egg earned its own name. It was golden in color, and contained numerous tiny crystals within, which, when struck by a beam of light at the right angle, would ignite like a cloud of golden sparks. The stone was named "Hiranya Garbha" (translated from Sanskrit as "Golden Egg") – according to legend, this is the region from which Brahma, the Creator, emerges before the creation of the Universe.
