A wash of color rather than a statement of it. Enough warmth to separate from a colorless stone in daylight, little enough to stay quiet on the hand. The grading scale reads these as a step down. We select them for the ones where the color sits even and clean across the whole stone.

Kite, hexagon, shield, lozenge, bullet, trilliant. Angular outlines we pushed into the mainstream in 2014, when the trade still cut almost everything round. A straight edge behaves differently than a curve- it sits flush against another stone, holds a line in a cluster, and gives a designer geometry to build on rather than work around.