Find Your Perfect Diamond
Made to sit flush against the engagement ring it was designed for.
Every ring is made from start to finish in our Los Angeles atelier.
When it is first found, a diamond looks unremarkable: a clear pebble scarred by its journey from deep in the earth. Everything you will love about the finished stone is put there by the cutter's art, a craft five centuries in the making. Here is the whole journey, from rough ice to finished fire.
Diamond is the hardest substance on earth, which made it the last great gem to surrender to the cutter. The breakthrough came in the fifteenth century with the discovery that diamond could be worked by its own dust, and in 1475 the Flemish cutter Lodewyk van Berquem built the tool that changed everything: the scaif, a polishing wheel coated in oil and diamond dust, with an arm to hold the stone against it. For the first time, facets, and therefore brilliance, were possible.
What followed was five hundred years of iteration. Cutters first polished crystals, then sliced off crystal tops to make table cuts, then step cuts, then the sixteenth century's faceted rose cuts. The Mazarin, the first true brilliant cut, was developed in the mid seventeenth century for the French court at Versailles. The eighteenth century brought the old mine cut, with its rounded cushion outline, high crown, and deep pavilion echoing the original octahedral crystal, named for the Brazilian deposits that supplied the era. Then the industrial revolution armed cutters with steam power and motorized saws, and the round diamond was born: the Old European cut carried 58 facets, the same count a round brilliant carries today.
The final refinement was mathematical. In 1919, Marcel Tolkowsky, a young Belgian from a cutting family studying mathematics in London, published Diamond Design, his calculation of the proportions that return the most light from a round brilliant. Adjusted over the decades, his numbers became the foundation of the modern ideal cut, and they are still what the proportion section of your certificate is measured against.
Modern cutting happens in sophisticated facilities, most of them in India, with Israel, Belgium, and China as the other major centers, and the craft runs on remarkably thin economics: cutters typically work for margins of one or two percent, competing on the expertise that pulls the most value from every crystal. The work itself unfolds in five stages, and a decision at any one of them moves the value of the finished stone.
| Step | What Happens |
|---|---|
| 1 · Sorting | Rough is sorted by hand and machine into shape, size, color, and clarity categories, thousands of value classes in the largest facilities, examined in diffused daylight |
| 2 · Planning | The marker maps every gem the rough could yield and decides what to cut; on large stones this single judgment can take months |
| 3 · Dividing | Cleaving splits the crystal along its grain with a precise blow; sawing or lasers work against the grain, the laser burning through in a fraction of the time |
| 4 · Bruting | The outline takes shape as diamond is spun against diamond; fancy shapes take longer than rounds, and the heart, with its curves and cleft, is hardest of all |
| 5 · Faceting & polish | Each facet is ground on the diamond powder wheel at its exact angle, then polished mirror smooth; one wrong angle leaks light out of the stone forever |
The arithmetic the whole process fights: yield runs around 30 percent, so a one carat piece of rough typically becomes a one third carat polished diamond, the rest departing as dust on the wheel. Rough itself is classed by fate before the work begins: makeable rough becomes one stone, sawable rough is divided first, cleavage rough splits into many pieces, and the remainder is ground into industrial grit.
Planning the cut is the most complex step and the one where experience earns its keep. One large round that sells for more per carat but wastes more rough, or two smaller pears that waste less? What is every possible stone in this crystal worth on today's market? The marker, the most skilled cutter in the room, weighs the variables, decides whether the rough is sawn or cleaved, and marks exactly where the cuts fall.
Today the marker works with three dimensional scanners that render the rough, map its inclusions, and estimate the color and clarity of every gem it could produce, comparing outcomes with a precision no loupe could offer. But the machines only price the options; the choosing is still human. And once cutting begins, whatever the shape, round, princess, emerald, pear, heart, marquise, or oval, there is no room for error: an expensive crystal can crack on the wheel, and every stone that survives carries a share of the ones that did not.
Five centuries of craft compress into three things worth remembering at the moment of purchase.
Brilliance, fire, and scintillation are made on the wheel, not in the ground. A finely cut stone outshines a larger, whiter, cleaner one cut poorly, which is why cut leads every recommendation we make.
Tolkowsky's legacy is that ideal proportions are measurable and printed on every certificate. You never have to take a seller's word for the quality of the cutting; the numbers are right there to be read.
Seventy percent of the crystal leaves as dust, and the marker's months of judgment ride on what remains. When you understand what the finished stone survived, its price stops being mysterious.
ROSI™, our gemological intelligence, built by our gemologists, reads every proportion and grade on a certificate and scores how the cutting will actually perform in light. Request a ROSI™ Score Report on any stone, ours or anyone else's.
Nature makes the ice. The fire is made by hand, wheel, and five hundred years of accumulated judgment.
Every finished diamond is the survivor of a gauntlet: sorted from thousands of classes of rough, planned for months, divided, shaped, and faceted where a single wrong angle would have dimmed it forever. Respect for that process is not sentiment; it is the most practical lens a buyer can own, because it points you at the one C the cutter controls completely. Buy the cut, and the fire comes with it.
Found a diamond you are considering, here or anywhere else? Send the GIA or IGI certificate number and our gemological team returns its ROSI™ Score and a read of where it sits in the current market. Complimentary, within minutes.
Score a DiamondWhere stones of the same exact specifications are trading on the open market right now. You get a straight answer, even when the diamond is not ours.
John Anderson, our Lead Gemologist, reads cutting quality from certificates and video every day, and will show you exactly what the proportions, polish, and symmetry of any stone predict about its life in light. The consultation is complimentary and there is no obligation.
1-800-779-1726