Help with Buying Multi-Facet Princess

[Chump413]

Hi everyone--looking to you experts out there for help.

My lady prefers the Princess cut over the traditional Round, but obviously is drawn to the "brilliance" and sparkle of the Round. As a compromise, she has become interested in these "multi-facet" diamonds out on the market that have 100+ facets (Movado, BBB''s Lineage for example).

What are your thoughts on these types of diamonds? A lot of these cuts are proprietary and therefore a significant premium seems to be charged. I have only begun to learn the basics and would appreciate someone pointing me in the right direction--should I look at 100+ facet diamonds or look for a very high quality normal Princess?

The specs I''m looking for are ~1.5 carat, DEF color, VS or VVS clarity. I don''t know much more beyond that (table %, depths, etc.--not that savvy yet...) Budget of $10K-15K.

Please help!!

Many thanks...

 

[JulieN]

This is a picture of a 4 chevron princess http://www.whiteflash.com/princess/princess-cut-diamond-2265077.htm
Looks like it has enough facets, to me.

There are also 2 and 3 chevron princesses.

Bruce Harding: "I prefer designs with minimum facets because they give stronger 'bang-bang' on-off reflections/contrast that attract the eye" http://journal.pricescope.com/Articles/29/1/Grading-the-Princess-Cut.aspx

A princess already throws off lots of tiny sparkles, and you add more facets it makes the sparkles smaller, resulting in the loss of contrast and that bang that Bruce wrote about.

Sooo...if you like the look of high faceted princesses, that's cool, but it's not going to perform more like a round.

One thing you can do to increase the performance of your diamond, top cut aside, is to get a bigger stone.

 

[Chump413]

Goodness--so much to learn. Fantastic article. How do you tell how many chevrons a princess stone has?

 

[JulieN]

There's pictures on page 3 of the Harding article.

Looking at the pavilion (bottom) view on the report, you count the number of Vs (but don't count the X in the middle.)

 

[oldminer]

We are able to grade princess cuts in our lab of any cut configuration or facet number for Light Behavior with a relatively new tecnhology that has been discussed on many previous threads in Pricescope. If you find any that you want performance numbers on, we''d be glad to assist you or anyone else with this process.

We are pretty sure that there are many possible configurations of princess cuts which offer very good light performance other than just the AGS 0 design. So there are many choices. Probably more than with round shapes.