Why Choose a Pear Cut Diamond?

February 21 2022

Pear-Cut Diamonds - otherwise known as the Pendeloque or the Teardrop cut - are sparkling, slender and graceful with a lengthening effect. Perfect for all types of jewellery and most beautiful when surrounded by smaller diamonds - for example as a halo engagement ring.

This diamond shape is called a modified brilliant cut, where it has a subtle blend of a Round Brilliant and Marquise cut diamonds. The pointed tip of a pear shape diamond can cause any trace of colour to be concentrated. Choosing a stone with a colour grade of H or higher will ensure your diamond looks crystal clear from base to tip. Though this cut is stunning, it is one of a few diamonds that can suffer from the bow-tie effect: this is where an area of shadow resembling a bow tie can be seen in the centre of the stone. Whilst it’s not unusual for some shadow to be visible in Pear shape diamonds when viewed from a certain angle in a certain light, it’s undesirable for a diamond to have an obvious dark area when viewed from any angle in all lights. You should look for a stone with minimal shadow to detract from its beauty.

This cut originated in 1475, the diamond cutter named Lodewyk van Bercken invented the diamond-polishing wheel: which enables him to polish all the facets of the diamond to optimize light reflection within it. He used this diamond-polishing wheel to introduce the concept of utter symmetry in the placement of facets, producing the Pendeloque or Briolette-shaped diamonds (these are shorter versions of the Pear shape). The Pendeloque shape was known to handle light poorly with very little sparkle, making it unsuitable for commercial sale. However, since this, we now have the beautiful Pear Shape diamonds we see today.

Technical Specifications

The amount of facets a Pear-cut obtains is between 56 to 58.
There are between 4 to 8 pavilion main facets, these are the facets on the bottom half of the diamond - though these are hidden, they are considered the most important as they allow light to enter and reflect through the diamond.
Between 1.5 to 1.7 is considered the perfect ratio for this diamond cut. The higher the ratio, the slender the diamond.