Rare & Custom Diamond Cuts | Trillion, Portuguese, Hexagon

Not every stone wants to be round. Some ask for an edge, a corner, a silhouette that argues with tradition instead of repeating it. Beyond the familiar round, oval and emerald cuts, diamond cutting has always produced rarer geometry — shapes with their own history, their own optical character, and their own place in a piece of jewellery.

Cut to Be Uncommon

A round diamond is a diamond behaving as expected. The shapes on this page chose a different argument — cut not for the widest market, but for whoever eventually wears them.

Hexagon Cut

Six sides, and not one of them apologises for the others.

A step-cut diamond bounded by six straight edges and a flat, elongated table. Some hexagons run close to equilateral and sit compact on the finger; others stretch longer, closer in spirit to an emerald cut with the corners squared off rather than cropped. Either way, the light behaves the way step cuts always do — long, cool, mirror-like reflections rather than a scatter of small flashes.

Trivia: hexagonal and other sharply geometric step cuts had their moment in the spotlight during the Art Deco era of the 1920s and '30s, when jewellers were reaching for architecture — straight lines, symmetry, repetition — as inspiration.

Because the table sits wide and flat, an inclusion has nowhere to hide — clarity matters more here than in almost any other shape.

Portuguese Cut

One diamond, cut as though it couldn't decide how many diamonds to be.

Where a standard round brilliant carries around 57 facets, a Portuguese cut can carry 160 or more — sometimes well past 200 — arranged in concentric tiers rising from crown to pavilion instead of the usual single ring of facets. The effect isn't a handful of bold flashes; it's a shimmer that never quite finishes moving.

Trivia: nobody can pin the Portuguese cut to a single inventor or year — the most-repeated account traces it to cutters working with the flood of Brazilian rough that passed through Lisbon in the 1700s. It was reportedly built for candlelight, since more facets meant more chances for a dim room to find the stone.

The extra facet layers do cost some spread — a Portuguese cut typically sits a touch deeper than a round of equal weight, trading a sliver of face-up size for that density of sparkle.

Lozenge Cut

Four points, and every one of them earned.

A diamond-shaped step cut, in the literal sense — four straight sides meeting at four points, faceted in the same long, parallel rows used on an emerald or Asscher cut rather than the triangular facets of a brilliant. The result reads quieter and more transparent: less about catching the eye from across a room, more about rewarding whoever's looking closely.

Trivia: step-faceted diamond and lozenge-shaped stones appear repeatedly through 18th- and 19th-century European jewellery, prized for exactly this restraint.

It's a natural fit for minimal, architectural settings, since the stone's own geometry is doing the talking.

Trillion Cut

Three sides. No fourth one missed.

A triangular brilliant with three equal sides and a flat table, cut with anywhere from roughly 30 to 50 facets depending on whether it's finished as a side stone or scaled up as a centre. Because the brilliant faceting is built for a curved outline and here it's working around hard corners instead, a well-cut Trillion throws a particularly clean, geometric flash — brilliance with edges.

Trivia: the shape traces to the Asscher brothers' workshop in Amsterdam, but its name has a genuinely tangled legal history — two different American firms trademarked near-identical triangular cuts in the 1960s and '70s, one as "Trilliant" and one as "Trillion," and fought over the names for two decades until a US court ruled in 1986 that the two words sounded too alike for either side to keep the trademark.

Because a triangle carries three vulnerable points instead of a curve's none, protective settings — a V-tip prong or a bezel — aren't a styling choice here so much as a structural one.

Moval Cut

A shape that refused to pick a side and got its own name for the trouble.

Part marquise, part oval — the pointed tips of a marquise grafted onto the fuller, rounder body of an oval, producing an elongated silhouette that flatters the hand without the marquise's sharper, more fragile tips. Most Movals are finished at a length-to-width ratio between about 1.7 and 2.2, the range most eyes read as elegantly long rather than narrow.

Trivia: unlike the other four shapes on this page, Moval isn't an old cut with a documented past — it's a modern portmanteau, coined in the trade rather than handed down through it.

It's a favourite for anyone drawn to the marquise's drama but wary of its points — the same elongating effect, worn with slightly less caution.

Beyond the Standard Range

Old mine cushions with their soft, candlelit facets. Dutch marquise cuts with a shape all their own. Emerald cuts pushed slightly off their usual symmetry. The catalogue of rare cuts runs far past what fits on one page — and it keeps growing, as cutters continue finding new arguments against the round brilliant.

If a shape you're curious about isn't listed here, or you'd like to know what's currently available in one of these rare cuts, get in touch and our team will help.

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