Former Sunrise Weekend TV presenter Talitha Cummins has called it quits on her journalism career after 20 years for a career change.
Talitha joined Seven in 2004 as a weather presenter and occasional news reporter in Queensland before transferring and moving to Sydney in 2011 and later replacing Jessica Rowe as the news presenter for Weekend Sunrise in 2014.
Recently Talitha was working as a newsreader at Triple M but has decided to leave the industry so she can focus on being a jewellery maker.
“It’s a big shift, but the move to launching my own business has given me an energy and drive like never before.”
She co-founded her own business with her Uncle Craig who has 50-plus years of experience in the jewellery field and her cousin Kara.
Their business, The Cut Jewellery, specializes in lab-grown diamonds.
Why? She explains why the trio chose lab-grown diamonds instead of mined ones, “When I went to the GIA to study diamond grading in London, we were handed a lab-grown and a mined diamond and asked to use a microscope to tell them apart. We couldn’t.”
“We learnt that they’re indistinguishable because they are chemically, physically and visually the same. They sparkle in the same way as they’re made of the same substance. Pure carbon. I was fascinated.”
“Exactly the same product, much lower price point. A business was born that day.”
The Natural Diamond Council revealed the biggest difference between lab vs mined diamonds, “Natural diamonds are finite and rare. Diamonds are becoming rarer every day because no new significant deposits have been discovered in about 30 years,”
“However, lab-grown diamonds can be manufactured in potentially unlimited quantities similar to any manufactured product, thus they are not finite and cannot be considered rare.”
The biggest myth that Forbes has debunked is that mined diamonds don’t increase in value.
It is extremely rare and very unlikely that a mined diamond will increase in value similarly to gold. A huge marketing scheme.
It’s not that much of a shock that Thalia decided to leave the industry after The Daily Telegraph reported at the time that Seven News chief Craig McPherson phoned Cummins nine weeks after she gave birth to her son, Oliver, to tell her she was no longer under contract. They parted ways shortly after that.
For now, we look back on her 20 years of journalism congratulate her and wish her luck on the journey to come.