Marquise Cut — The Boat-Shaped Brilliant with the Royal Origin Story
Marquise Cut — The Boat-Shaped Brilliant with the Royal Origin Story
Pointed elongated brilliant cut, also called navette, dating to 18th-century France
The marquise cut — also called the navette (French for little boat) — is an elongated boat-shaped brilliant cut with two pointed ends, typically faceted in 56 facets following a modified round brilliant pattern. The cut is one of the older fancy shapes in the diamond and coloured-stone trade, with origins in 18th-century French court jewellery, and remains a common cut for engagement rings and pendant centre stones in both diamond and coloured material.
Origin
The marquise cut is conventionally dated to the reign of Louis XV of France (1715–1774), and the most-repeated origin story attributes the cut to a commission by the king for a stone in the shape of his mistress's smile. The Marquise de Pompadour is the figure usually named, though the historical record for the specific commission is thin and the story is best treated as an attractive piece of trade lore rather than verified history. What is documented is the appearance of the cut in French court jewellery from the mid-18th century onward, with the form refined through the 19th and 20th centuries into the modern 56-facet brilliant variant.
Faceting and proportions
The standard marquise consists of a table, a crown of bezel, star, and upper girdle facets, a girdle, and a pavilion of main and lower girdle facets, totalling typically 56 facets. The brilliant pattern is modified to suit the elongated outline, with the pavilion main facets running from the centre of the stone outward toward the points. Length-to-width ratios in commercial production range from approximately 1.75:1 to 2.25:1, with 1.95:1 to 2.10:1 generally considered the most desirable proportion range. Stones outside that range read either as too stubby (under 1.75) or as too elongated and bow-tie-prone (over 2.25).
The bow-tie problem
The most common quality issue in marquise diamonds is the bow-tie — a dark band running across the centre of the face-up view of the stone, perpendicular to the long axis. The bow-tie is caused by light leakage in the pavilion: in elongated brilliants, certain pavilion-angle and length-to-width combinations produce a region in which light entering the stone from above cannot return to the eye and is instead lost through the back. The result is a dark zone that interrupts the brilliance of the stone. Bow-ties are present to some degree in nearly all marquise, oval, and pear-cut diamonds; the question is the severity. Well-cut marquise diamonds show only a faint bow-tie that varies with viewing angle; poorly proportioned stones show pronounced dark zones that do not move with viewing angle.
GIA grading
GIA grades marquise cuts for symmetry, polish, and proportions but does not assign an overall cut grade to fancy shapes (round brilliants are the only shape for which GIA assigns an overall cut grade as of 2024). The cut quality of a marquise is therefore evaluated by inspection — checking length-to-width ratio, the symmetry of the points and the curve, the pavilion depth and angle, the table size, and the bow-tie. The pointed ends are vulnerable to chipping and require V-prong or bezel protection in setting; the symmetry of the two points is a key visual element and should be carefully evaluated.
Application
The marquise is used for diamond and for coloured stones, with rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and tanzanite the most common in commercial coloured-stone production. In ring setting, the marquise's elongated outline can have the visual effect of lengthening the wearer's finger, which is one of the design rationales offered for the cut. The pointed terminations require careful setting to protect against chipping; the standard approach is V-prong settings on the points and standard prongs on the sides, or a full bezel mount that wraps the entire perimeter.
In the trade
The marquise has fluctuated in popularity through the 20th and 21st centuries, with peaks in the 1980s and a relatively quiet period in the 2000s and 2010s; recent years have seen a modest resurgence in the engagement-ring market driven by interest in less common fancy shapes. Marquise diamonds at equivalent quality typically trade at a discount to round brilliants — often in the order of 10 to 30 per cent depending on size and quality — and the cut allows the buyer to obtain a larger face-up size for a given carat weight than the round brilliant equivalent.