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The New Signature Oval by Jonathan "Rhino" Weingarten

The New AGS Ideal Cut Oval by Jonathan "Rhino" Weingarten

 

Greetings and welcome to our tutorial on the New Signature Oval by your's truly.  Over the course of the past years I've been developing and re-inventing a number of new cuts since the August Vintage products.  Our new oval is the first to be released and instead of doing half a job, I've taken the shape to a whole new level not yet seen or witnessed in our industry before.  While we think of a good name to trademark, first some introductory info... 

In the following video I explain how our new signature oval came to be and use one of the brightest commonly cut ovals I could find to compare it too.  I show the oval in

  • office lighting,
  • spot lighting and
  • natural daylight. 
The most important lighting to view it in IMHO is the daylight and shows the visual difference you'll see most of the time.

Re-Inventing the Oval Brilliant Cut

Before the days of "ideal cut" diamonds and when education on the subject of cut quality was extremely limited, consumers who were buying diamonds would generally see the following graphic and do the best they could to purchase the diamond that was closest to the "ideal" standard they learned about.

The days of line art drawings have come and gone and real science has impacted our industry in an overwhelming way as we are now able to measure the percentage of how much light enters and exits and know the best angles to achieve maximum brightness, fire & sparkle in a diamond.  Below are ray tracing examples of various proportioned rounds.

 
I'd like to draw your attention a little closer to the above graphics because when it comes to fancy shaped diamonds like the oval brilliant cut, not one but two of these graphics come to play when it comes to ovals on the current market.  There is the profile to consider along the width as well as the profile to consider along it's length.

When we look at an oval along it's width measurement we're seeing the profile, primarily of it's belly.  This is the area where well cut ovals will display the best light return.

Observing the profile of a well cut oval along its width, it appears very similar to that of the ideal cut round.  Ray tracing and ASET technologies confirm this.

In the ray tracing program, as we run a beam of light into the crown we get consistent light return along the belly and in the ASET image we see the richest amount of reds across the belly as well. Reds and in certain cases blue, in the ASET result in those parts of the diamond that will display rich light return.

You can also observe this in many of the videos I've shot of ovals over the years and you can also observe it in accurately shot photography in real world observation.  Here is one such video below.

The Problem with Oval Brilliant Cuts Today

The problem with oval brilliant cut diamonds are three fold.​

  1. Oval brilliant cuts, even supposedly the "best" cuts are by nature too shallow when you leave the belly area and begin observing from the mid section up.


When we look at the profile of an oval along it's length we can't help but notice how similar it is to the shallow cut round from our first graphics. The first graphic on the left is a shallow cut round the 2nd on the right is the profile of an oval along its length.  It's even more shallow than the "shallow round".

     2. These areas which are too shallow suffer from extraneous light leakage coupled with drawing too many reflections from dull areas in our environment which causes two ill optical effects.  Those being ...

  • severe loss of brilliance.​

  • color absorption

Severe loss of brilliance. When we run typical ovals through ASET analysis we observe the severe loss of brilliance particularly noted on the upper and lower parts of the diamond.  You can see this clearly in the first 3 graphics below as indicated by all the extraneous white and green areas. The new signature oval by AV Inc. (on the far right) has solid reds/blues in those areas ensuring the diamond is grabbing and reflecting light at these most crucial areas.  Ie. no brilliance lost where it typically has always been lost.

Opulence Oval ASET

Step #1 was giving proper depth to the oval along it's length, much like an ideal cut round or square has.