Why We Only Sell Ideal and Excellent Cut

The short answer

A poorly cut diamond is a stone that was optimised for a spreadsheet rather than for light.

There is a version of diamond buying where you are shown two stones, told one is a D colour and one is an F, and asked which you prefer. You squint. You cannot see it. You choose the D because it sounds better, and you pay for the privilege.

Meanwhile nobody mentioned cut.

Cut is the only C the cutter chooses

Colour and clarity are set the moment the rough comes out of the growth chamber. Nobody chooses them afterwards. Cut is different. Cut is what the cutter decides to do with that rough, and it is the only one of the four that can be sacrificed on purpose.

A cutter looking at a piece of rough has a decision to make. Cut to the proportions that return the most light, and lose weight. Or cut to preserve weight, hit a round number on the carat scale, and accept a stone that leaks light out of the bottom instead of throwing it back at you.

The second option pays better. A 1.00ct stone sells for meaningfully more than a 0.94ct one, and most buyers are looking at the number rather than the stone.

Compare cut grades with a specialist

What it looks like

What it actually looks like

Put a well cut and a poorly cut diamond side by side under the same light and the difference is not subtle. The well cut stone is alive. Light enters the crown, bounces internally, and comes back at your eye as brightness and fire.

The poorly cut stone has a dull patch under the table. Cut too deep and light escapes through the bottom. Cut too shallow and it passes straight through. Either way you get a stone that looks like glass in certain light, and no amount of colour grade rescues it.

This is the part that matters: nobody has ever noticed a colour grade across a room. They notice whether it sparkles.

[cut-diagram]

Understand the 4Cs

Our position

So we removed the choice

Every white diamond we sell is Ideal or Excellent cut, with Excellent polish and Excellent symmetry. For a round brilliant, Ideal is the highest cut grade IGI gives, one step above Excellent. Not very good. Not good. We do not stock the others, which means you cannot accidentally buy one from us.

That costs us range. There are larger stones and higher colour grades we could offer at the same price if we relaxed on cut, and plenty of sellers do exactly that. We would rather hand you a stone that looks like a diamond should.

The budget

Where to spend instead

If cut is fixed at the top, the interesting question becomes where to spend the rest of the budget. Our answer is carat first, then clarity.

An eye clean VS2 looks identical to a flawless stone without magnification, and costs considerably less. Colour is not somewhere you can save with us, because every stone we sell sits in the colourless band, D to F. Clarity is. That saving goes into a stone that is visibly larger on her hand, which is the difference people actually see.

Find your stone

Closing

The grade almost nobody asks about is the one that decides whether a diamond looks like a diamond. Fix cut at the top and spend the rest where it can be seen. If you want the full picture on how the four work together, our guide to the 4Cs covers each one properly.