You are thinking a gift? Let’s do a portrait of your loved in a sapphire. Some people do it. For example, on October 7, the day of his 63rd birthday, Russian President Vladimir Putin, has received a gift of a blue sapphire of 3,055 carats, with carved his face in 3D. The Putin sapphire was designed and built by Victor Petrik, who has developed a method to cut three-dimensional images of any hardness gems, including diamonds. Putin sapphire, is not, in fact, the only precious portrait: the gem dedicated to Russian tsar is one of 90 3D portraits on rubies, sapphires, topaz, and other natural or synthetic stones. Among the subjects portrayed are President George HW Bush, Mahatma Gandhi, Pope John Paul II and of Jesus Christ. Now even the Russian president is among the faces that will last forever.
The engraving process begins as a traditional carving wax and then, it moves (the detail of the passage is secret) to the care of the laser. Petrik, of Russian origin, was called a “modern Thomas Edison” by his admirers, but it is also a kind of Gyro Gearloose not very well regarded in the scientific community, very skeptical about ideas like a filter that should transform radioactive waste drinking water, a device that extracts rhenium from waste material, or a compound that converts light into electricity.
