A perfect cut is not something that was born out of a day’s experiment. It took years of trying to give a gemstone cut the perfect it needs to make a stone look more than perfect. The story of a brilliant cut is something like that. The brilliant cut is the result of six centuries of trial and error and skills of a number of craftsmen. It is through these long years of unremitting effort and consuming energy that the brilliant cut received its dramatic transformation. The brilliant cut is the best we have got right now, in terms of brilliance, fire and geometry. That’s the reason why it is called the ideal cut.
We did not have a grading system when the brilliant cut, as we know it, was created. Nature has the last say over 3 out of the 4Cs of a diamond. Nature decides the color, carat and clarity of a rough diamond. It is the fourth and only C that is for us to control, and thus, man, through hardships and persistence mastered the craftsmanship to create a cut that can give a rough mineral crystal all the characteristics it needs to rise above everything ordinary and commonplace and be recognized as the rarest and shiniest.
The Geometry of the Brilliant Cut
The anatomy of every cut has similar components. The brilliant cut too falls under this chart. It was a table, a girdle, a pavilion and culet. The brilliant that we see in stones today has a total of 58 facets. If you exclude the culet, then there is 57 of them. These facets are distributed in specific numbers throughout the geometry of the cut. There are a total of 33 facets on the crown alone, about 25 at the bottom on the pavilion. The modern brilliant cut has faceted girdles. The girdle has anywhere between 32 to 96 faces.
The Sparkle
The round brilliant cut has maximum sparkle, as compared to all other kinds of cuts. This quality may be attributed to the facets which are calculated and positioned to pass the light in a way so as to enable maximum reflection and refraction. Light behaves differently inside a brilliant cut diamond than in a two-dimensional gem. The facets cut in a brilliant cut stone are so angles that light can enter it from all directions and escape through any. This gives the stone its sparkling character.
