The Story of the Jeweler With the “Diamond Eye”

By Rob Bates | October 24, 2025

There are times when Slater Jones is walking around town and he’ll catch people staring at him, and wonder why. That’s when his girlfriend will remind him: “You have a diamond in your eye.”

“It’s so comfortable,” the 24-year-old owner of Jones Jewelry & Co. in Houston tells JCK. “I sometimes forget I have it.”

Still, it’s hard not to notice that Jones sports a 2 ct. gemstone where his right eye should be. He’s had it for two years, and says he doesn’t mind when people gawk.

“We went to Disney World, and it was crazy,” Jones says. “All these kids wanted to take pictures with me.”

The story of why there’s a large natural diamond embedded in Jones’ right eye socket begins when he was 17, and living in a juvenile detention center in Alabama. (“I was a stupid kid,” he says.) He noticed the vision in his right eye was starting to deteriorate.

“I was begging my people to take me to an eye doctor, and they’re not taking me,” he says.

When Jones finally saw a specialist, he was diagnosed with ocular toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection that can cause vision loss. (He believes he got it at the detention facility, but was never able to prove it.) He was told he needed emergency surgery. But that first operation “ripped out about 75% of my retina,” Jones says.

Over the next three years, he saw a total of 10 doctors and underwent five surgeries. Nothing worked.

“My eye was done,” he says. “There was just no fixing it.”

Doctors eventually took out the eye and fitted Jones with a standard prosthetic. Around that time, he developed an interest in jewelry.

“I was broke and living at a friend’s home,” Jones recalls. “I needed a way to make money and started thinking about jewelry.

“I found a small store in my area and told the owner I needed help. I showed her something I had made just by watching YouTube videos. She liked it, and I asked if she could teach me jewelry. She said no, she didn’t have the time. I decided I wasn’t going to give up. I went down the street and bought her coffee and doughnuts. I said, ‘Just let me watch you.’

“I would spend all day at the jewelry store, almost sleeping there, just watching her, learning stuff.”

Jones later moved to Houston—where he began his own jewelry business—but before he left, his mentor at the store presented him with a gift. “She would always give me little gemstones and stuff,” he says. “She gave me this diamond and said, ‘Keep this. One day you might need it. You might find a girl you want to propose to.’”

At the time, Jones wasn’t interested in settling down (he’s now engaged), and he wasn’t sure what he’d do with the 2 ct. stone. Until a friend had an idea.

“My buddy told me, ‘You got a jewelry business, you got a diamond, and you got a prosthetic eye. Put two and two together.’”

And so Jones asked his ocularist, John Imm, to place the diamond in his prosthetic. At first the doctor was skeptical.

“I didn’t know if we could do a diamond that large,” Imm says. “It’s about twice as thick as the average eye.”

The process “took a while,” says Jones. “John was worried, obviously. I just wanted to do something cool.”

Imm says he’s occasionally done “novelty” prosthetics—like a “Terminator eye” and an eye adorned with a coat of arms—“but this is the most expensive prothesis I’ve ever had to make. And nothing’s gotten this kind of reaction.”

The eye first attracted widespread notice when one of Jones’ friends posted a picture of him on Twitter (now X).

“He called and said, ‘Dude, this picture has 7 million views and I don’t know what to do,’” says Jones.

Since then, every few months a new batch of articles will pop up about Jones’ sparkly prosthetic. Generally, the attention dies down after a few days. But over the past week—it’s not clear why—Jones has received a torrent of coverage, including a long piece in the Daily Mail, which compared him to a “real-life Bond villain.”

“This is the biggest it’s ever been,” Jones says. “It’s gone global. I’m on blogs in Vietnam.” (He notes that JCK is the first publication to actually reach out and talk to him.)

Jones doesn’t know if all the fuss has helped his business, but he sounds both tickled and overwhelmed by his newfound notoriety. He gets recognized pretty regularly and recently heard people talking about him on local radio, which he found “really weird.” And he says he’d be interested in a reality TV show.

“You type in ‘diamond eye,’ and my picture comes up,” Jones says. “I used to freak out bad about being tagged, but now I don’t care. They have so much posted about me, I don’t even know what half of it says. It’s crazy. I’ll go on these blog posts, and there’s my face.”

(Photos courtesy of Slater Jones)