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Before a diamond is presented as a beautiful piece of jewellery, it goes through many stages of production. The most fascinating part of the diamond manufacturing process is predicting what polished diamonds come out of the rough diamonds. The rough stone is the natural state of the diamond when it is found - they come in a variety of shapes including crystals, octahedrons, dodecahedrons, maccles (triangles) and cubes or a broken piece from one of these shapes.

Certain countries or mines produce a higher percentage of certain shapes due to the heat and pressure conditions when the diamond was formed. For instance the Jwaneng mine in Botswana produces a lot of cubes whereas Russian mines produce a lot of crystals.

Most diamond cuts have been produced to maximise the yield from different rough diamond shapes. For example, the princess cut was designed to maximise the yield from crystals, the round brilliant cut from octahedrons and the marquise cut from long thin pieces of rough.

Manufacturers group their rough diamonds into three categories:

Sawable

• Stones that will be sawn in two to give two high yielding polished stones. Most Crystals and octahedrons are manufactured in this way.

Makeable

• Stones that will be polished straight away from the whole rough stone. Most broken pieces, cubes and maccles are polished in this way.

Splittable

• Where you have inclusions or cracks in a rough stone the stones are laser cut or cleaved ( very much like splitting a piece of wood with a chisel) before each split piece is manufactured into a polished stone.

The shape and type of the stone and its origin will very much affect its colour, strength and the life and clarity of the stone. The Radiant team has a vast amount of experience in this area and fully understands where its polished stones originally came from and which origins will give its clients the best results. We are able to use this knowledge to ensure our clients get the best possible stones.