A diamond cut, for most of history, belonged to no one. It was geometry, a shared language, available to any cutter with the skill to execute it. That began to change in the twentieth century, when a handful of jewelry houses realized that a proprietary cut was something that could be owned, protected, and worn as a form of brand identity as legible as a logo—and that the most unforgeable signature a house could put on a stone was the shape of the stone itself. Even if the patents are expensive to secure and harder to sustain commercially than they are to announce, with experts noting, too, that unusual cuts can fetch lower prices on the secondary market, the appeal hasn't faded. Proprietary diamond geometry has become one of high jewelry’s subtle status signals: instantly recognizable to those who know what they are looking at. Here are some of the..
