The Point Cut
The Point Cut
The earliest faceted diamond style, polishing the natural octahedron rather than reshaping it
The point cut is the earliest documented form of faceted diamond cutting, practised in medieval Europe from the fourteenth century, in which the cutter polishes the eight natural faces of a diamond octahedron into mirror-bright planes meeting at a sharp central point. No additional facets are added; the work is finishing rather than reshaping. The result is a stone whose form follows the diamond's crystallography directly, with two pyramidal halves meeting at a girdle line that is itself a natural crystal edge.
Historical context
Diamond cutting in medieval Europe began as polishing rather than faceting, and the point cut represents the first systematic effort to bring out lustre from the rough octahedron without removing material in the modern sense. Bruges, Antwerp, and Paris emerged as cutting centres in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the technical knowledge of how to polish diamond against diamond using diamond grit understood within tightly held workshop traditions. The point cut was the form a cutter could produce reliably with the tools and abrasive available, and it was the form that paying clients of the period — primarily royalty and senior ecclesiastical figures — would recognise as cut diamond.
The cut precedes both the table cut and the rose cut, which followed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries respectively as cutting technique extended beyond simple polishing. The introduction of the table cut — flattening the upper point of the octahedron into a horizontal facet — represented the first deliberate reshaping of the rough, and the rose cut later abandoned the octahedral foundation entirely.
Form and optical character
A point-cut diamond shows eight triangular crown facets meeting at the upper point, eight matching pavilion facets meeting at the lower point, and a girdle that follows the natural crystallographic edge between the two pyramidal halves. There is no table, no culet, and no crown or pavilion break facets. Optical performance is modest by modern standards: the stone returns light through internal reflection but lacks the brilliance and dispersion that later faceting styles, with their carefully calculated angles, can achieve. The visual character is more glass-like than fire-bright.
For the medieval and early Renaissance buyer, the point cut was nevertheless a substantial improvement over uncut diamond. The polished planes returned light cleanly where rough surfaces scattered it, and the sharp point provided a visual focus that the irregular shape of unpolished diamond could not match.
Survival and museum context
Point-cut diamonds survive in museum collections, in the older European royal jewels, and occasionally in early-medieval reliquary and ecclesiastical settings. Most have been recut at some point in the intervening centuries, since later eras valued the optical performance of newer cuts more than the historical character of the original. Truly intact point-cut diamonds in early medieval settings are rare and command significant premiums in the antique market when documented, with attribution typically resting on the setting's provenance rather than the stone alone.
In the trade
For appraisers and historians of jewellery, the point cut is a reference rather than an active style. The cut is not produced commercially today and has not been since the table cut superseded it in the fifteenth century. Its relevance is in dating attribution, in understanding the technical history of diamond cutting, and in interpreting the surviving examples in collections at the Tower of London, the Schatzkammer in Vienna, the Topkapi in Istanbul, and elsewhere.