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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.