SQUARE TIMES

SQUARES NOW ACCOUNT FOR ONE-THIRD OF ALL ENGAGEMENT RING SALES, ALMOST DOUBLING IN SALES IN THE PAST FOUR YEARS. SHOULD YOU CHANGE THE SHAPE OF YOUR DIAMOND BUSINESS?

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SQUARE TIMES #1
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At The Gem Lab in Rochester, New York, all diamond presentations are loose: several stones, girdle to girdle on a white paper or gray blotter. "What I'm presenting," says Paul Cassarino, who has worked side by side with his father Joe for over 35 years, "is diamond beauty, pure and simple."
An FGA, like his father, GG, CAPP (Certified Appraiser of Personal Property), and holder of the Gemmological Association of Great Britain's gem diamond diploma, Cassarino knows the business of diamond beauty. It thus comes as something of a surprise when presentations at The Gem Lab tend not toward round brilliants but princesses. "If they're well-cut," says Cassarino, who finds the princesses of New York's Hasenfeld-Stein time and again to strike the perfect note, "my customers often gravitate toward them as well during the presentation."
Cassarino says that's increasingly true as consumer awareness of the fourth C, and of square cuts in particular, grows. "Rochester's a fairly technical town," he says, "particularly in optics, with Xerox, Kodak, Bausch & Lomb. From an engineer's standpoint, the princess' symmetry stands out. What I love doing is showing a more expensive stone, say a $7,000 EVS1 round next to a $4,200 GVS princess, and use the pricier stone to sell the princess. With its larger table, you're going to get less fire than with a round, but the sensitivity to sparkle is more immediate. Behind my counter, I have a shelving area with dark spaces, and I'll take both stones into the shadows to show their performance. It's a selling trick, if you will, but also closer to the light conditions of reality. There, the liveliness, the contrast of light and dark that the princess achieves so well with its pavilion faceting, is very apparent."
Put together with the square cut's savings—and all that affords, for the customer to go up in clarity, color, and size—the princess dramatically overshadows elongated fancies. "So what it'll often come down to, for the guy in by himself, who's been told either round or square, is that it's different. Not that different, but enough. All his life he's seen round diamonds, and now here's one he's probably seen once or twice, so it's not terribly new. And unlike the elongated fancies, it's 10 to 20 percent less than, rather than a similar amount above, the round. And the sale is closed."
CUTTING CORNERS
In 2006, the round brilliant accounted for 47 percent of engagement ring sales. According to the Diamond Information Center, that is the first time that sales of rounds have been less than half of the market. The difference is in sales of the princess and square category, which accounted for 30 percent of all engagement rings in 2006, almost double sales four years ago. Squares, which include princess, cushion, asscher, and proprietary cuts, accounted for only 9 percent of engagement ring sales as recently as 1999. Look at your engagement ring case. Do you see less than one-third squares? Is more than half taken up by rounds? If so, you might not have the right merchandise for today's engagement ring customer.
That's not the only reason squares have become increasingly important to the independent jeweler. Fancy shapes are very difficult to buy sight-unseen, giving jewelers an advantage over on-line merchants. Reports just don't convey all the subtleties of the varied facet patterns possible. A few Internet sites have proprietary squares (there's even a squarediamond.com) and the princess is Blue Nile's second most popular shape, but squares are always best appreciated live.
Square shapes are also very popular in the larger diamond sizes preferred by the wealthy today. As the average size of center diamonds goes up, the percentage of squares and cushions is bound to increase. One reason that the growth in sales of four-sided diamonds has stayed a bit below the radar is that there are now so many squares. There are now at least 58 patented, patent-pending, trademarked, and private label square shapes on the market.
The square boom has sound marketing reasons. While even well-cut rounds like the hearts and arrows have become, as S.A. Gems' Chris Latrobe points out, "a bit of a commodity themselves," square cuts have helped grow a half-dozen or so proprietary princesses, such as Israel's EFD and Los Angeles' Bez Ambar, into brand names. It has sound practical and gemological reasons. As brilliance is achieved by a variety of facet patterns, different crown and pavilion designs offer great opportunities to individuate. Similarly, square cuts require far more training, techniques, and machinery to cut well than rounds.
These differences extend naturally to retail, where the shape enables differentiation that few rounds can. The 57 facet round cannot be patented or trademarked. Squares, with the exception of the 41 facet princess, can be, and almost always are, often offering jewelers opportunity for a local exclusive.
More than a third of the newer square cuts are princess variants, capitalizing on the American Gem Society's decision to launch its performance based cut grade for fancy cuts with the most popular square shape. Some add or subtract from the 41 facets of the card-carrying princess (the range varies from 24 to 88 facets); have sharp or cut corners; or mix step-cut crowns and brilliant pavilions. The distinctly different Crisscut cushion by Christopher Designs, Lucére by Ernest Slotar, and Tiffany's Lucida are just a few of the possible variants.
Following an old square tradition—the square variant of the Peruzzi cut was long known as the Lisbon—a number brand by provenance: seven Canadian princesses, six Asian variants, three of Russian provenance, two from southern Africa. The "square brilliant," which in early incarnations such as the Jubilee, Regent, and Hope showed the hearts and arrows pattern of a 57 facet ideal, has seen regional variations: a 53 facet Czar cut; Eurostar's Pro-68, a 68 facet square for the Taiwan market; and the 99 facet Dubai cut by Kristall.
David Yurman's signature diamond is one of three cushion variants that show hearts and arrows. It's one of ten cushion variants to emerge from the shape's 21st century rebirth, testimony that with the diamond, form follows function, or at least fashion. The days when an inherited emerald or baguette would be recut to a brilliant stone or a mixed cut are pretty much history. Advertising for Tiffany's new "Novo" cushion is helping drive even more demand.
The cushion is so popular today that bridal brands like Tacori and Kirk Kara even have ring styles that surround rounds with a pavé silhouette to make them look like cushions. Some cushions are branded or modified for provenance; others have added facets, and still others, in the tradition of the Starburst cut by Louis Glick, are for fancy yellows.
In the process, the shape has tended more to the square ratios than the 19th century "pillows." With much of the available rough, that enables greater weight retention. From a design standpoint, it enables the shape to appear in round-oriented settings. Square-radiant variants, which offer the safety and four-prong setting ease of cut corners, appear in numerous brands. You see them in "diamond wall" motifs formerly tackled by baguettes or invisibly-set princesses. Ratios can go as high as 1:1.1 and still maintain a distinctly square look, enabling cutters to follow rough for greater retention and giving designers more choices. As with the cushion, the trend is toward squarer radiants. That has set the emerald cut further on its own as a rectangle.
Princess cuts and variants of higher brilliance increasingly offer what is often referred to now as "chamfered" corners. The term, which sidesteps the connotations of trimmed, cut, or clipped is a borrowing from industrial engineering, and applicably so. When corners are trimmed to the point that they are simply micro-facets, invisible to the naked eye even loose and typically resulting in a loss of less than a point cumulatively, they are purely structural. While they can be difficult and time-consuming to achieve, they safeguard stones to that great bane of the princess: the chipping that can come from percussive shocks in day-to-day wearing. You see chamfered corners on Hasenfeld-Stein's new "FireMark" princess, a patent-pending variant with a "double crown" that is always cut to the strictest tolerances for pavilion and crown angles.
THREE REASONS FOR FOUR SIDES
Why this proliferation of the square? Automation. Much as the asscher was born partly of the introduction of the rotary diamond saw a century ago, the ease of blocking, cutting, and polishing squares has grown with lasers, robots, and software designed or modified for the shapes. As cutting extends deeper into Asia, where a number of these techniques were pioneered, this trend will doubtless grow. Such refinements have enabled very precise cuts, such as Lazare's square emerald, whose perfect symmetry and proportions add the brilliance needed to achieve margins.
Advancements in performance-measuring technologies at labs such as GIA, GCAL, and AGS have greatly enabled the industry to quantify beauty in square cuts, and determine premiums for superior makes. An advantage square cuts always hold was borne out with these advancements: a wider choice of parameter sets to achieve beauty and optical effects. With the introduction of the AGS triple zero for the princess, AGS's Peter Yantzer noted that "high performance was found over a wide range of proportion sets. We found 6mm squares with top performance that weighed anywhere from 1.3 to almost 2 carats." That type of retention rate would never be found in a round. Labs such as GCAL have also been proactive in detailing the new shapes with reports.
The second reason is diamond jewelry styles. As recently as a decade ago, one saw square shapes predominantly in larger sizes. Anything smaller than three grains might well read as a smaller-looking round, with the additional weight covered in typical four and six-prong settings. This was particularly true of fancy colors, as the brilliance of a well-cut round could delimit the stone's face-up color—not to mention its margins, with the loss of rough. Common exceptions were matched pairs for studs, where even the smaller square shapes identified themselves against the curve of the lobe, or simply with stones set with a corner down.
Innovative princess settings, however—such as the Noor setting for Laxmi Diamonds, Peter Storm's Naked jewelry, and Siera's die-struck semi-mounts, which solve structural concerns of invisible settings with micro-set prongs—helped increase public acceptance of the shape. Crucial also was the right-hand ring category, as Hearts On Fire's Maarten de Witte points out. It carried north-south settings (and with them, square shapes) deeper into the jewelry vocabulary. "The Dream," he says of the Boston company's square brilliant, "sells as one would expect of a loose fancy, particularly well in larger sizes. Where it really takes off for us is in jewelry."
Finally, price. In the 20th century, when you came upon a squarish diamond less than a carat in size, often as not it meant that its cutter had "followed the rough"—an oddly shaped crystal or rough that had blocked out to two or more square shapes. Such diamonds tended toward step cuts, which are present but rarer in shapes more square than rectangular. The facets of step-cut diamonds, running parallel to the girdle, are rectilinear by definition. Abbreviating such facets for a squarer shape runs counter to the natural graining of most rough shapes, losing time and weight to the wheel. Until the ascendancy of the princess, the industry standard was to saw the crystals for two round brilliants, and achieve margins in the retention of the rough and the added brilliance, fire, or scintillation in the finished stones.
IT'S ALL IN THE ROUGH
And therein lay the rub, as well as a huge industry inefficiency: When one saws octahedral rough, the result is two square tables descending to pointed pavilions. With Tolkowsky's 1919 observations, and with the backing of the round as the engagement shape from the 1930s on, the taste for rounds created a vicious cycle in which untold rough carats ended their billion years of life as diamond dust. As much as 20 percent is lost in blocking/bruiting that square table into a round. "The perfect shape for weight retention, with the flatter crowns and deeper pavilions that conform to the shape of octahedral rough, is the princess," says Cassarino.
Indeed, before the rotary diamond saw, a far larger number of diamonds and cuts adhered to the square outline of a cleaved diamond. Ironically, the first princess cutters tended toward flat (macle) for their rough, relegating the bulk of octahedral crystals for rounds. Princess predecessors such as Basil Watermeyer's Barion drew added life from such rough with faceting far higher than the princess' 41 facets, paving the way for crescent-shaped pavilion facets on some latter-day princess variants, as well as the signature "chevron" facets of the princess.
It begs the question: Why did everyone lose all that rough for all these years? "When I meet someone at a party, and they ask about my overhead," a manufacturer of rounds confides, "it's the only time I'll ask that question of myself. It's been standard procedure for so long but the answer's straightforward: My overhead's in the rough." With the syndicate homogenizing the downstream chain from the mine to the newly engaged, that 20 percent lost to the cutting was not only viable, it was de rigueur. As rough prices spiral, however, and as marketing initiatives center less on the round, manufacturers and, in turn, the public are now asking themselves: Is the round really more brilliant than a princess, a cushion, a radiant, an asscher?
Actually, generally, usually, it is—with exceptions, of course. Square shapes leak more light than rounds. Semi-brillianteering provides less brilliance and dispersion than fully brillianteered stones; spreadier tables mean less scintillation. Manufacturers of some semi-brillianteered stones confess that even their well-cut stones will cost a color grade. Is that extra brilliance worth the extra cost, to the point where one must pay it?
SQUARE BUSINESS: BUT WHICH SQUARE?
On a recent trip to the mall, where we have three nationwide value jewelry chains, as well as a Sears, Macy's, and J.C. Penney, I counted 137 diamond engagement rings; 39 were square shapes, and all but six of those were princesses. There, the public had clearly spoken. The square shape most widely known and accepted is the princess, clearly justifying, from a market standpoint, the AGS's decision to begin its fancy cut triple zeros with the shape. That predilection continues to other categories, and to that great augury of diamond futures: CZ jewelry. Today's 19-year-old wearer of CZ princess studs may well ask for a princess diamond for her engagement.
At higher price points, where the range is wider and knowledge of cut is likely to run deeper among customers, retailers and designers specializing in fancy cuts will tell you that their personal advice (and taste) is key to the final choice. At Chicago's Lester Lampert, a door that has long prioritized fancy cuts over rounds, the in-house taste for radiants and Royal Asschers has turned many shoppers of princess cuts in a different direction.
"I have nothing against the princess," says David Lampert. "And there are cutters that consistently turn out better makes. We're a design house, so we tend away from rounds to begin with, both to individuate and because the square shapes offer more design alternatives. And because our engagement rings tend significantly above the national average [at roughly 2.5 carats], at those sizes, I'm going to gravitate toward a stone with tremendous life, and I find the radiant a very brilliant stone. As I'm also looking for a diamond with its own special elegance and beauty, I'm a big fan of the Royal Asscher. I mean no disrespect to other beautiful cuts, but as square emeralds go, it pretty much embarrasses the field."
"Among celebrity clientele," says Chris Aire, a Los Angeles designer to the hip-hop community, actors, and professional athletes, "the square shapes are as strong as ever, particularly in the five to 10 carat sizes. It brings an interesting dilemma, because I happen to be a great believer in the round. I think it's the most brilliant shape, and from a business point of view, its resale value, because it's a known quantity, is so much stronger than a fancy's. There's always going to be that client who must have a princess, and a few have wanted it to be just a cushion. I find the radiant a more brilliant cut and asschers are elegant."
Aire continues, "When I'm designing an eternity band and I'm leaning away from rounds, I'll almost always go toward radiants and asschers, and they combine very well together. I've also introduced lines in Bailey Banks and Saks, and have found radiants a great design choice. The squareness enables so many options, and if you're setting it raised, as a main event, you can surround a one carat stone, one that already reads 10 or 20 percent bigger than a round, with round and square pavé for a huge diamond look that's surprisingly affordable."
To Clyde Bailey of Bailey's Fine Jewelry, who sees the trend toward square cuts both in his three North Carolina doors as well as his capacity as the Continental Buying Group's president, it comes as no surprise that squares have eaten so much of the round market. "Take the typical bridal sale," he says. "The guy's mother and the gal's mother, 95 to 100 percent of the time, have both been wearing round diamonds the whole time they were growing up. But they're the next generation, there's so much more information and choice out there, and they're embarking on their own new family. The shift toward square shapes probably began with the princess and the radiant, but it's extended to choices other than the round, or the elongated fancies, which tend to have their fashions, and then not."
Bailey continues, "I see this with the cushion, or for us the Cushette. I love the shape, but I found, as the cushion started to come back in style, that I was sending three-fourths of the stones back. They just didn't perform, or they had that appearance of a hole in the bottom from the cushion's culet. With that incredibly detailed GCAL report for the Cushette, I can source on-line. I still have cushions in stock, and I use them in presentations to sell the Cushette. The customer's eye picks the Cushette out, every time, and it brings the whole process of selling squares home to me very strongly."
"With anything other than your typical 57 facet round brilliant, the customer is looking to you, strongly, for guidance," says Bailey. "You're no longer just the guy behind the counter, you're now a fashion consultant, and they're leaning on your experience, your education, and your travels to come to the right decision. At the same time, it's all so personal—even more so with a fancy diamond—so the stone really has to perform. Not only does it have the price hurdles of any diamond sale to overcome, it has to overcome the stereotype of the round as well. With a diamond like the Cushette, where the difference is so apparent to the eye, where I can make greater margins than with a round of the same size and still offer my customer a savings of at least 15 percent? Hey, that's square business, pardon the pun."
BUYING Square Cuts
If square cuts have been off your radar, it may pay to brush up on some basic gemology. This is as true for generic cuts as for the growing range of proprietary shapes and for squares sourced on cert rather than live. Depth percentages, crown heights, and pavilion depths in rounds are measured relative to diameter. For squares, one multiplies width by length for surface-area calculation (minus any area lost to cut corners), then compares it to the depth percentages. As a square shape becomes more rectangular, depths should increase correspondingly, resulting in smaller, higher crowns. They will show less of the "crushed glass" look of, say, an emerald cut.
For truer squares, with wider tables and shallower depths, pay attention when inspecting stones to surface glare. It means the diamond is reflecting light off the table, rather than refracting and dispersing. Remember that squares are less brilliant than rounds to begin with. Contrast, brilliance, and color flash lost to glassy tables can be fatal to face-up appearance.
Clarity can impact value more with squares than rounds. Inclusions may face up more visibly. The corners of a princess lay at the outer edges of the original crystal, so one tends to find more inclusions there. Because they will be pronged over, you may be able to cherry-pick a grade below where you started. On the other hand, naturals weaken the lattice structure at the periphery, and may render a princess more susceptible to chipping. If the dealer is new or for any other reason suspect, examine stones for laser-drilling. It's been estimated as many as a third of value-priced princesses are fracture-filled.
Fluorescence can be less impactful on value with squares, particularly if a stone is already on the line between two colors. A fluorescent square may well face up whiter (or "bluer" or "blue-whiter") than non-fluorescent rounds. While not as evident when the square is examined pavilion up, in the I-K ranges it can make a huge face-up difference in the simpler facet patterns.
"If there's one disadvantage with the growth in square cut popularity," says John Sabet of Washington, D.C.'s Charleston Alexander, "it's that prices have gone up 7 or 8 percent in the past few years, particularly in the off-sizes, where you could almost always find a deal. But for the better princesses, the squarer radiants, the square cushions, cutters are getting their price. Cutting has improved so much from the day when squares were typically these bulgy, heavy stones that faced up smaller than their weight."
— Ivan Solotaroff
SELLING Square Cuts
"The square cut? It's the perfect brick and mortar diamond," says David Nygaard of Virginia Beach's David Nygaard Fine Jewelers. "As unappealing as that may sound, there are sound reasons. Because the standards and parameters are so broad, they're harder to compare and price on-line, harder to present visually, and it adds up to a broader range of prices to present. Because the shape is less price-sensitive, it can also enable a customer to go up in size or a grade."
A square-radiant variant in Nygaard's "PassionFire" collection also illustrates a signature advantage for the shape: the ability to private label. Most cutting houses specializing in proprietary cuts have growing libraries of square variants available for exclusive distributorship. "But if I had to point to one distinct advantage," says Nygaard, "squares are easier to sell than rounds."
"If they're in looking for non-rounds to begin with," says Clyde Bailey of North Carolina's Bailey's Fine Jewelry, "they've already severed themselves from stereotype. It's important to recognize that, mention it, and to keep it in balance with the wider discussion of diamond beauty. A great way to accentuate that difference is to show the stone in a mounting. When you drop the square in, right away they're going to see the difference from all the rounds they've been looking at, and they're going to see that they're getting 20 to 25 percent more real estate. That's added value, and it brings home the added value of that diamond's unique personality."
Lighting conditions can highly impact a customer's perception of a square. Pay attention to any fluorescent lighting when showing. Their added warmth can detract from a stone's ability to show contrast, crucial to presentation of the scintillation that may well be the square's great advantage. "For a square cut," says Nygaard, "I'll sometimes just take the customer outside and let the stone dance in the sun."
— Ivan Solotaroff
Squaring IDEALS
Cut grading has transformed the market for rounds, bringing more uniformity and better proportions. But squares are still much more varied. There isn't really a consensus on what constitutes "ideal" proportions for a princess, square emerald, asscher, radiant, or cushion. Proprietary cuts and brands add different facet patterns and formulas for success.
"Rounds are pretty much all the same," says Herz Hasenfeld of Hasenfeld-Stein. "But princess cuts are pretty much the Wild West. The market is flooded with poor make stones. Today you have to recut rounds with a 65 table. In the future, you'll have to recut princess cuts, too."
Efforts to improve the cut of square shapes are increasing. "One notable difference is the quality of the finish today, both polish and symmetry," says Tom Moses, senior vice president, GIA Laboratory. "We have begun working on the whole topic of cut grading for fancy shapes and certainly there is something that can be systematically derived on how to cut fancy shapes. I am reluctant to use the term 'ideal' as it connotes a single set of values. What I think we will find is that the cutting parameters for fancy shapes is broader than that for rounds. I would anticipate that there will be more options in a given cut grade."
The American Gem Society launched a performance-based princess cut grade in 2005. A radiant cut grade will follow this year. "The princess cut has been a huge success," says Peter Yantzer, executive director of AGS Laboratories. "It proved our metrics and methodology because our research pointed to areas where princesses had never been cut before. Those who want to have learned how to consistently cut it to achieve the AGS ideal 0 cut grade. The key is the pavilion of the stone."
Do consumers have to give up fire and brilliance when they choose a princess? "Compared to a round, they give up a little of both," Yantzer says. "But that doesn't mean that a top performing princess isn't exceptionally beautiful."
GCAL measures the light performance of squares and also has a princess ideal cut report, although fewer diamonds earn this report than the round ideal. "I've seen a square that rivals a round from the standpoint of capturing light," says Don Palmieri, GCAL president. "We measure if light is leaking. We rarely see anything below an 85 percent in light return and I've seen 100 percent. So people are definitely trying to do a better job. Do you have to sacrifice on light return? Absolutely not. But many princess cuts have no crowns, which means no fire."
Hasenfeld will market his new double-crown "FireMark" princess with a custom GCAL report documenting light return consistently above 95 percent. "The same person who buys a triple zero round will buy this," Hasenfeld says. "There is tremendous pent-up demand for a princess that performs."
— Cheryl Kremkow
author: BY IVAN SOLOTAROFF, SENIOR EDITOR - Modern Jeweler




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