Table Percentage
58 – 72%
Wide tables are expected on this shape. Stay below 75% — above that, the stone begins to lose depth of sparkle.
Shape · Face-Up View
Light Performance · Live
The most efficient cut in the business. More diamond from the rough — but four sharp corners that demand respect and the right setting.
The princess is a square or rectangular brilliant cut with untruncated corners — the defining characteristic that separates it from the cushion and radiant. Its inverted pyramid shape retains more of the original octahedral rough than any other brilliant cut, which is why cutters and retailers alike favor it. The sharp corners produce brilliant-quality sparkle across the full face, but they are also the stone's single vulnerability: unprotected corners chip, and the setting choice here is not aesthetic — it is structural.
The princess cut was developed in the 1960s and 1970s through contributions from several cutters, with Betazel Ambar and Ygal Perlman receiving a 1979 patent for a version of the square brilliant they called the "profile cut." The shape was refined through the 1980s as diamond saw technology improved and became commercially dominant by the 1990s — the decade in which it briefly challenged round brilliant as the top-selling shape in the United States.