2.25cttw Old European Cut Diamond Cluster Ring with Brushed Sides in 10k Gold

The face of this ring is an oval plaque filled with old European cut diamonds — three larger stones running down the centre with smaller ones packed in around them, all set in white metal against a heavy yellow gold body. Look into any of them and you will find a small dark dot at the middle: that is the open culet, and along with the small table and tall crown it is what marks the cut out from a modern brilliant. The shoulders are finished in a cross-hatch brushed texture rather than polished, broad at the top and tapering back. 2.25 carats total weight in 15.10 grams of 10k.

Nobody makes these any more, and that is the whole story. Old European cuts were shaped by hand on foot-driven wheels for candlelight and early electric bulbs — small table, deep crown, a culet left open at the bottom — so they return light in a few broad slow flashes instead of the fine even glitter a modern brilliant gives you. Cutting stopped in that style around the 1940s, and recutting one to modern proportions costs twenty to thirty percent of its weight, so the number of them in the world only goes down. Two and a quarter carats of them matched for size and colour in a single head is the harder part still, because no two were ever cut to a specification. What else on your hand could not be replaced at any price?