How Do They Cut Diamonds?

Cutting a diamond is the only factor that is under human control; the rest is created by nature. Because of this, diamond manufacturing has become an art of its own. Even if a diamond has a D color grade and a flawless clarity grade, the beauty of the diamond can easily be offset by a bad cut grade. To learn more about diamond cut grade visit

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Before the mid 1300s, rough diamonds we not cut. It was actually believed that is was bad luck to cut a natural stone. The people before this time had no idea what beauty laid beneath the surface of these rough stones. The first cutting procedures were extremely simple and resembled octahedral crystals. These stones were a basic four-sided cut. Further in time, diamond cutting evolved to the table cut, the single cut, the old mine cut, the old European cut, and now the modern brilliant cut. The single cut style laid the ground work for the modern brilliant cut because if revealed that more facets meant more brilliance. The current modern round brilliant cut diamond includes a round outline, symmetrical triangular and kite-shaped facets, a table, and sometimes a culet. This particular shape of a diamond is evaluated more strictly than any other diamond shape.

The first step in the cutting process is planning. Unlike popular belief, the decision to cut a diamond in a certain shape is actually because of the natural shape of the rough stone. While technology has created a lot of progress in the diamond manufacturing industry, diamond cutting is still a difficult task that requires an immense amount of knowledge and experience.

The goal in the manufacturing process is to produce a diamond with the best cut, saving the most carat weight, and at the lowest production costs possible. This is what makes planning one of the most crucial parts of the cutting process.

A planner decides where to mark the rough stone for fashioning into the most beautiful and profitable diamond. Factors of size, clarity, and crystal direction all play an important role in this process. An incorrect decision by as little as a fraction of a millimeter can sometimes make a difference of thousands of dollars. In fact, if cut in the wrong place in the wrong position, a diamond could shatter and therefore become worthless.

The second step in the cutting process is cleaving or sawing. After careful planning and marking where the diamond is to be but, it can be manually cleaved.

Sawing can be done manually with a diamond-coated rotary saw or by a laser. The reason for the diamond-coating is because diamonds are considered the hardness known substance to man; therefore, it is often said that the only thing that can cut a diamond is another diamond. This is true in the fact that without the diamond-coating, the rotary saw could not cut cleave a saw by itself.

The third process is bruting. This process created the basic face-up outline of the diamond before faceting. During this phase of cutting, the diamond is spun on a rotating lathe while another diamond is forced against it. This gradually forms the outline.

After bruting is the final stage of the cutting process which is polishing. This phase creates the finished proportions. During the polishing stage, there can actually be more stages to develop a beautiful stone. Most significantly is the blocking. Here a diamondʼs basic symmetry if created and the first 17 or 18 facets are made. The process ends here for very small diamonds. For larger stones, they continue to the brillianteering stage. The final facets of a stone are polished by a specialist called a brillianteer. This final step in the manufacturing process will determine the amount of brilliance and fire the diamond possesses. Any type of inconsistencies, whether large or small, can easily make a diamond look dull.

Many consumers have heard the term, heart and arrows. These shapes are visible due to the results of a skilled brillianteer.

Because of the costs involved with manufacturing, many diamonds on the current market are not cut in the country they are sold nor the country they are mined. In fact, because of the low cost of production compared to other countries, India is now one of the primary countries that manufactures most of the industryʼs diamonds.

Regardless of the location that diamonds are manufacturing, diamond cutting is an extremely difficult process that is to be treasured as an art. To view our selection of loose diamonds at wholesale prices, visit http://www.instylediamonds.com/rt/sform.pl?cfg=adi.