Princess

The princess is a square brilliant, and it is the most efficient of the ten. Cut from the rough with far less waste than a round, it delivers noticeably more carat for the money, and the brilliant faceting beneath a flat square table produces sharp, bright, contemporary sparkle.

Its weakness is structural and specific. Unlike every other square or rectangular shape here, a princess keeps its corners sharp and uncropped, and those corners are the thinnest, most exposed part of the stone. They must be covered, ideally by prongs shaped to sit over them rather than beside them. A princess in an open setting is a chip waiting to happen.

Colour tends to gather at the corners, which is where a warmer stone gives itself away first. It is worth looking there specifically rather than at the table.

The shape is firmly of its moment, developed in the 1980s and still reading as modern rather than antique. It suits people who find a round too expected and a step cut too severe. Channel-set accents running into the shoulders complement the geometry, and a bezel solves the corner problem completely while making the outline even cleaner.