Peter Schneirla doesn't volunteer what he does for a living. It's not that he's in-between jobs. He doesn't work at Freddie Mac.

Schneirla is chief gemologist at Tiffany & Co. He doesn't often share that tidbit at cocktail parties because the next thing you know, some guy's dragging his wife over by the ring finger, demanding to know if he got his money's worth on her baguette.

''How interesting,'' Schneirla ends up saying -- a lot.

But the Tiffany charity affair last week at the home of Miami philanthropist Adrienne Arsht was a different story entirely. Much like the Jean Schlumberger collection of undulating necklaces and enamel bracelets encased in glass, Schneirla himself was on display.

''They wheel me out like Elinor of Acquitaine,'' he quipped.

The event included a raffle of 20 Tiffany trinkets to benefit the YMCA of Greater Miami. For a betting man, the odds were good. And for Tiffany, odds were good that well-heeled guests would take notice of the Schlumberger pieces, which run from $1,200 to about $500,000.

One of the those was brooch with a hummer (not the technical term) of an aquamarine. The rock might have passed for something burped from a bubble gum machine had it not been on the shoulder of Arsht, who sported some of her own dazzling Tiffany.

Schneirla said Schlumberger was the first jeweler to have his very own atelier installed at Tiffany's. The Frenchman, who came to the United States after World War II, was big on nature, and he often replicated vegetation and birds.

For that reason, Schneirla said, the line seemed a particularly good fit for Miamians.

''His jewelry was decidedly not architectural,'' Schneirla said. ``There was visual movement in his pieces.''

But more interesting than Schlumberger was Schneirla himself.

Here was the man -- funny, tall and not the least bit condescending -- who, in an Armani suit and Brooks Brothers tie, delivers Tiffany to the world's top-spenders and the world's top-spenders to Tiffany.

How does he go about it?

''We have a very decidedly low-key approach,'' Schneirla said. ``We make friends and then customers happen.''

Schneirla is based in New York, and he doesn't often make appearances such as these. But this was special, he said. For decades he has counted Arsht as a ``very good friend.''

That the charity was held in her sweeping mansion was another reason to coax him out of the office.

''There are homes,'' Schneirla said, ``and there are homes.''

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