Asha® Education : Hearts & Arrows Cut

Asha® Hearts and Arrows
under the scope

Our latest generation of Asha® is being cut to the exacting standards of the Hearts and Arrows cut, something fewer than 1 in 1000 (thats less than .1%) round cut diamonds will ever achieve! This article is designed to help you understand the difference between a typical round cut stone, and a Hearts and Arrows round.

Hearts and Arrows is an industry term for a specific type of round cutwhere all facets are in perfect alignment, proportion and symmetry. Cut is one of the four major components of diamond grading.  Cut controls 98% of the brilliance of a round cut gem or diamond. However, cut is often the least understood of the four C's, and often the most disregarded. It's easy to understand carat weight, color and clarity, but cut is difficult.

In order to view how light is being reflected within a stone, various viewers are used that magnify your view of the gem, and tint the light so that the eye view how the light is being reflected. They do under various names depending on what jewelry store you visit, but most high end jewelry stores will have one.

They look like this (The image on the right).

Hears and Arrows Scope➜

When viewed with the tinted light, patterns will show up on the stone. A typical round gem will show a whirl pattern, with no real symmetry. What this shows is that the facets are not in proper alignment, resulting in a blurred out look as the light bounces around and is leaked out rather than being reflected back to the viewer.

By contrast, the top of a hearts and arrows gem will show a perfect crisp arrows pattern, visually indicating that all the facets are in alignment, and that the light return has been maximized by the cutter.

In similar fashion, you can view the bottom of the Hearts and Arrows gem and see the following pattern (on the right):

Hearts - Pavillion

Arrows - Crown

Again, the crisp pattern shows that the bottom half of the stone's facets are also in perfect proportion and symmetry. Any misalignment of any facet will result in arrows that bend at the tips, or hearts that are uneven or other blurring out of what should be a perfect, crisp pattern.

So why aren't all round diamonds cut to Hearts and Arrows? The reason is simple: time and money.
A typical round cut diamond can be finished in roughly 2 hours. By contrast, a Hearts and Arrows diamond can take anywhere from 8 hours to several days, and even then may not show the perfect symmetry required to produce the crisp Hearts and Arrows pattern. The more cutting time involved, the more the cutter has to charge for his/her time. While cutting an Asha® is simpler than diamond because you have a flawless rough to work with, our cutters have to spend on average 8x as long for the Asha® H&A simulant vs. if they simply wanted to cut a standard round brilliant.

Additionally, in the diamond world, diamonds are often cut to achieve a certain size. Most retail customers are very focused on the size of a diamond -i.e. they want a 1 ct. A diamond achieves a heart and arrows cut by cutting away a lot of original rough. Thus, diamond rough that could be cut into an average round 1 ct. may only amount to a .70 Hearts and Arrows cut. Thus, most cutters will opt to please the typical consumer who is interested in a specific size diamond, and additionally, many cutters do not have the skill necessary or the funding to produce something as rare as a Hearts and Arrows cut.