Recutting an Old European 1.56ct Diamond

1.56ct Old European
1.56ct Old European

There are some people out there who will gasp at what I am about to do, as they think these diamonds are precious.  Someone Google’ed sell diamond and we ended up buying this 1.56ct Old European cut diamond. From the photos you can see the diamond looks nothing like a modern round brilliant cut.

I have no way of knowing how old it is, but lets say it was cut 100 years ago.  The shape is obviously not round (at least way out of round), it has a very large culet at the bottom which creates the 8 sided circle you see in the middle.   The diamond is very shallow with a depth of only 52.5%. It measures 7.75mm wide so it does look nice and big.

During it’s life the girdle had obviously seen it’s fair share of impacts as there are a lot of nicks and a few nice chips.

066A5781 066A5780

We already ran the numbers to see if we could get a high quality Excellent cut out of this diamond, but it does not have the depth required and we would end up with a diamond below 1ct.  So the plan has changed and we are going to stick with a Very Good cut and try and hold as much weight as we can.

This stone is being sent off to the diamond cutter for modernization.  Hopefully we will get back a diamond of at least 1.10ct that will give us a GIA cut grade of Very Good.

Will do a couple of follow-up posts about this little guy….

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