Hi everyone.
Been seeing alot of new cuttings on tanzanite and wanted to know some of your feedback. Which cutting style do you prefer? Antique Step cuts or Modified brilliant cuts?
Tanzanite Stone Images are from online for comparison.
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Antique step cut is my favourite
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My personal favorite is the Antique Step Cut. To me, that cut seems to have more depth and color. Brilliance & flash are ok in a lot of cases. But there is a great deal of beauty to be had with subtlety. Isn’t the night sky beautiful on it’s own, even when there are no fire-works going off ?
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Antique cut does it for me too, simplicity and calmness, the Modified Brilliant Cut is too busy and chaotic and diminishes the natural color of the stone.
As you can see in the photos, it is hard to get a consistent or bright, well-distributed light return from step cuts, esp. emerald cuts. Something dark like tanzanite really benefits from a good pattern of light return distributed across the stone with adjacent facets winking on and off. Step cuts with a big wide keel will give you more weight for an equivalent face up area, the brilliant cuts less weight, but more brilliance. If you can find a (semi?) brilliant style cut with something of a keel, you can perhaps get some of the best of both worlds. The W^3/Vol statistic in GemCad tells you how much weight you are retaining compared to cuts of a similar width. What people are referring to in the step cuts is extinction, or areas where there is no light return. Appraisers don’t value extinction and more than 30% of it, area-wise, downgrades your gem, despite what some folks say about personal preference. In addition to the downgrade, the brilliant style cuts which throw a lot of light back face up and tilted just look better to most people. There is a reason gem cutting evolved to these. Take a look at cuts by Akhaven and Voltolini and you will see that they consistently design in this style.
Antique step cut is my favorite.
I have a number of different lose Tanzanite stones, and my favorite is Tanzanite is actually the round modified Portuguese cut. There is a cutter on You Tube that goes by Vintage Time who is a remarkable teacher.