Gem shapes and cuts

Many gemstones have wonderful shine and outstanding facets, but its still a rare case when you can uncover inner beauty of a gemstone without skills of gem cutter. In order to strengthen the attraction of a gem, which facets are rarely perfect, it is necessary to put it into shape and this in its turn depends on the setting of future jewelry.
In ancient times, gems were not usually shaped, they were simply grinded to put an emphasis on their color and then matched to appropriate setting. Of course these stones are rare now like Black Princes Ruby, a Britain treasure.
The main purpose of cutting a gemstone is to make it look dazzling through light interaction with the help of reflection, refraction and selective absorption.
How to know if the gem is well cut?
Well cut gem has even color, excellent sparkle, minimum inclusions and exhibit most of carat weight, looking from the top. It is also very important that your gemstone have a
good symmetry and should be perfectly polished with no minor hollows and lines. Pay attention to facets, they should be aligned towards gemstones girdle and each other. If you could compare the same gem with different cutting you can notice that a gem with a better cut has a better sparkle because a right angle enables light to play across the facets, reflecting it to the eyes.
Gem shapes
Mainly all gems could be distinguished as faceted gems, which have geometric faces and non-faceted gems, without geometric faces.
Cutting master can make from 14 to 76 facets, though 58 facet gem cut is a kind of standard, perfectly balanced round stone with optimal proportions.
In fact there is a wide range of gem forms to your liking, most common of them are emerald, pear, oval, marquise, princess.

Emerald
Primarily, this cut was applied to emerald so that to emphasize the color of the stone.This cut may include from 50 to 58 facets. Emerald cut has rectangular shape with bevel edged corners and even crown. While this cut remains an excellent one, its still quite easy to see any imperfections.

Oval
Oval cut enables small stones look bigger. Number of facets may range from 43 to 57. Due to oval shape and asymmetry brilliance of the gem is extended over the stone and give additional sparkle and volume.

Marquise
Classic 58-facet cut is used mainly for transparent gems, most popular is a actually a diamond. The best relation between length and width of this quite narrow cut is 1.5. You should always take care so that to avoid scratches or other damage to the stone, as it has pointed edges.

Princess
Princess cut has rectangular or square shape and 76 facets, which make the crown very fine. Princess cut produces a perfectly dazzling light, though hiding a bit of a color of the stone.