Collection: Cushion Cut Diamonds

A cushion is a square or rectangular diamond with softly rounded corners and gently curved sides — the outline of a pillow, which is where the name comes from. It descends from the old mine cut, the dominant shape of the 19th century, and has been continuously refined since. Of all the shapes, it offers the widest variation in faceting, which means two cushions of identical weight and grade can look entirely different.

Outline only, expressed as length-to-width ratio. A square cushion sits around 1.00 to 1.05 and reads as soft and symmetrical, filling the finger widthways. A rectangular or elongated cushion runs from about 1.10 up to 1.30 or beyond, drawing the eye lengthways the way an oval does and slimming the hand.

Elongated cushions have become the more requested of the two in recent years, though squares have never gone away and suit anyone wanting a fuller, rounder look. The ratio is on the certificate, but it is worth seeing both — the difference between 1.05 and 1.20 is far more obvious on a hand than in a number.

This is the part most buyers do not realise they are choosing, and it matters more than the outline. Cushions come in distinct faceting styles, and your certificate names which one you have.

Cushion Brilliant — the classic arrangement, with eight large pavilion facets. It produces broad, defined flashes of light: bigger, chunkier sparkle with clear dark and bright areas moving as the stone tilts. Often described as having more character or a bolder rhythm.

Cushion Modified Brilliant — an extra row of facets beneath the pavilion mains, breaking light into many smaller pieces. This is what people mean by crushed ice: a shimmering, glittery, all-over scintillation rather than distinct flashes. It reads as softer and more romantic, and it is very effective at disguising inclusions and body colour.

Antique or old mine cushions — cut before modern optics, with a high crown, small table and often an open culet. They give a warmer, candlelit glow rather than bright white return, and are prized by people who want something with genuine age.

None of these is better cut than the others. They are different optical effects, and the choice is entirely about which kind of sparkle you respond to. If you cannot decide from a description — most people cannot — that is exactly what an appointment is for.

A cushion receives the full 4Cs — carat, colour and clarity graded exactly as they are on a round — plus polish and symmetry, each on the same five-tier scale from Excellent to Poor.

Polish is the quality of the surface finish on each facet; Excellent or Very Good means nothing on the surface interferes with light passing through. Symmetry is how precisely the facets are shaped, sized and aligned, and how true the outline is.

What a cushion does not get is an overall cut grade — GIA reserves that for round brilliants. Because cushions vary so widely in faceting, no single standard could describe them all. Your report will name the faceting style, though, either Cushion Brilliant or Cushion Modified Brilliant, and that tells you a great deal about how the stone will look.

Because there is no cut grade to fall back on. GIA assigns a formal cut grade only to round brilliants, so on a fancy shape the certificate tells you polish and symmetry and little else about how the stone actually performs. Symmetry becomes the closest thing you have to a proxy.

But there are two kinds, and the certificate only covers one. The graded symmetry measures facet alignment under magnification. What you actually see is outline symmetry — whether the two halves mirror each other. A pear with shoulders of different heights, an oval with one end fuller than the other, a marquise with points that do not line up: none of that necessarily drops the grade, and all of it is obvious once the stone is on your finger.

Asymmetry also affects light. Facets that do not align properly send light out the side instead of back to your eye, which is what causes dead patches and heavy bowties.

So on a fancy shape, look for Very Good or better on the certificate — then look at the stone. The outline either reads as balanced or it does not, and that judgement is one you can make yourself in a few seconds.

Differently rather than less. A round brilliant is engineered for maximum white light return in a standardised pattern. A cushion trades some of that measured brilliance for fire — the coloured flashes you see when light splits into a spectrum. Cushions are known for it, particularly the antique and classic brilliant styles with their larger facets and higher crowns.

In candlelight or warm restaurant lighting, many people prefer a cushion. Under bright overhead light a round holds its own more consistently. Neither is objectively better; they perform differently in different rooms.

Solitaire suits the soft outline well, and a four-claw setting with rounded claws echoes the pillow shape rather than fighting it.

Halo is the most popular choice for a cushion, and there is a reason — a surround of small rounds against those curved sides looks quite romantic, and cushions with softer crushed-ice sparkle particularly benefit from the crisp contrast.

Three stone with half-moons or trapezoids either side flatters the curved outline, and rounds work equally well.

Side stones along the shoulders lift the ring and lead the eye into the centre stone, without competing with it.

Vintage-inspired settings — milgrain edges, filigree, a slightly raised gallery — suit cushions more than any other shape, given the cut descends from the old mine cut.

All made to order in our own workshop, built around your stone.

It depends on the faceting. A crushed-ice cushion breaks light into so many small pieces that body colour is unusually well disguised — H or I often faces up perfectly white. A classic cushion brilliant with larger facets and broader flashes shows tint more readily, so G or better is the safer choice in white metals.

Cushions also tend to look warmer than their grade suggests because of the depth many are cut to, so this is a shape where the certificate alone is a poor guide. In yellow or rose gold, none of this matters much — the metal warms the stone regardless.

Usually not, and crushed-ice cushions are among the most forgiving of any shape — the fragmented scintillation makes inclusions genuinely hard to see, so SI1 and often SI2 can be eye-clean. Classic cushion brilliants with larger open facets are less forgiving; an inclusion sitting under one of the big pavilion mains can be visible where the same stone in a crushed-ice cut would hide it.

We check every stone face-up before recommending it, which on this shape matters more than on most.

A square one carat cushion measures roughly 5.5 x 5.5mm, against about 6.4mm across for a round of the same weight. Cushions are often cut deeper than other shapes, carrying more of their weight below the girdle, so they can face up slightly smaller than the carat suggests. An elongated cushion at around 1.20 spreads further — closer to 6.5 x 5.4mm — and reads larger on the hand.

Because our images and videos are taken at high magnification — far closer than any human eye gets to a diamond, and far closer than the standard the stone was graded to.

Clarity grading is done under 10x magnification. That is the international standard: a grader with a 10x loupe decides whether an inclusion is there and how it affects the grade. Online photography routinely runs at twenty, thirty times life size or more, so you are seeing the stone at several times the magnification GIA used to grade it. An inclusion that fills your screen may be something the grader needed a loupe to find at all.

Colour matters too. A white or transparent inclusion — a feather, a cloud, a crystal without body colour — is far harder to see than a dark carbon spot of the same size, because there is little contrast against the diamond around it. Two stones can carry the same grade and look entirely different in the hand for that reason alone.

We photograph at high magnification deliberately. We would rather show you everything than shoot a diamond flatteringly and have you surprised later. But an inclusion that looks obvious on screen is very often invisible in the hand, at arm's length, on a moving finger, in ordinary light.

The grade tells you what is there. The magnification tells you where. Neither tells you whether you would ever notice it — that is a judgement we make face-up, under proper light, on every stone we hold.

Considerably, and it is worth knowing before you compare stones in different places.

Jewellery displays are lit to sell. Rows of halogen or bright LED spots directly above the case flood the stone with intense, concentrated light from every angle. That produces maximum sparkle and, at the same time, washes out inclusions — the scintillation is so busy that small imperfections simply disappear into it. A diamond in a well-lit display case is showing you close to the best it will ever look.

Daylight is the opposite. Soft, diffuse, coming from one direction. Sparkle is quieter, and anything inside the stone has nowhere to hide. Diamond grading uses controlled, colour-balanced daylight-equivalent lighting for exactly that reason — it is neutral, and it is reproducible.

Neither light is dishonest. But if you look at a stone under spotlights and then take it outside, you will see a different diamond, and most of a ring's life is spent in ordinary light.

When you view diamonds with us, you see them under professional diamond grading lights — the same neutral, colour-balanced lighting the laboratories use — and in natural daylight. No spotlit display case. If a stone looks right under those conditions, it will look right anywhere.

Always, and we would insist on it.

A single diamond on its own looks excellent. There is nothing to measure it against, so your eye accepts it. Put a second stone beside it and differences appear immediately that you would never have seen alone — one reads slightly warmer, one has more life, one throws broader flashes while the other glitters more finely.

This is how the trade buys, and it is the only reliable way to judge colour in particular. Colour grading is comparative by definition: graders work against a set of masterstones, not from memory. Your eye works the same way. Two stones a grade apart are obvious side by side and almost impossible to separate one at a time.

So we will put several in front of you. Sometimes that means you choose a lower grade than you came in for because you genuinely prefer how it looks, and sometimes it means you spend a little more because you can finally see the difference. Either way you will know why, which is the point.

No. Every diamond we sell is a natural diamond, and we've never dealt in lab-grown, simulants or treated stones.

A lab-grown stone is a manufactured product. It's grown in a reactor over a few weeks, then mass produced in unlimited quantities in any size or grade. That's the fundamental difference: a natural diamond took billions of years to form and exists in finite supply, while a laboratory-grown one is a commodity with no ceiling on production. It shows in the pricing — as capacity has scaled, lab-grown prices have fallen steeply and continue to fall, and there is no established secondary market for them.

What you're buying with a natural diamond is scarcity and origin. Rare, and natural. It's why we've never sold anything else. Read our full comparison of natural and lab-grown diamonds.

Our diamonds are independently certified, most commonly by GIA, with others graded by DCLA or HRD. The certificate is issued by the laboratory, not by us, and it accompanies the stone when it ships.

Yes. We are in Sydney's CBD and we see clients by appointment, so you can view stones side by side and compare them in person before deciding.

Just ask us. Finding a particular stone is a large part of what we do, and there's no obligation when you enquire. We'll do our best to source the finest quality natural diamond for you.

Our list is smaller than you'll see on some sites, and that's deliberate. Every diamond here is one we've looked at properly before listing it. Many diamond websites show tens or hundreds of thousands of stones drawn from shared trade lists — diamonds held elsewhere that the seller hasn't seen and won't see unless you order one. It looks like more choice, but nobody has assessed the individual stone, and two diamonds with the same details on paper can look quite different.

So if what you want isn't here, tell us what you're after and what you'd like to spend. We'll look for it, check anything we find ourselves, and only show you stones we'd be happy to recommend. If we can't find the right thing at your budget, we'll say so and talk through the options — sometimes a small change in colour, clarity or size makes all the difference.

Either way, you'll only ever be offered a diamond that we have complete confidence in recommending to you, and it will not just be based on the cheapest price.

Yes. Most clients select the diamond first and then the setting — either one of our existing designs or a fully custom piece made to your description or an image. Everything is handmade by our own jewellers.

Yes. We have many loyal customers all over Australia, and we're able to consult by phone and share photos and videos whenever possible.

Distance is not the obstacle people expect. We'll guide you through the options and select the finest quality diamonds and gemstones for you, so you can make an informed decision from wherever you are. The same applies to custom made engagement rings and jewellery — we'll talk you through it and keep you across it as it's made.

We deliver fully insured anywhere in Australia — every capital city, and regional and rural addresses just the same.

If you are able to come in, we'd always rather show you the stones in person — and if you're travelling to Sydney, appointments can be arranged on weekends.

Tell us the number you have in mind and what matters most to you, and we will show you the best stones we hold at that level. Cushions vary more than any other shape, so this is one where seeing several together is worth real money. We are a diamond merchant, not a retail jeweller — we do not charge retail prices, and we source natural certified diamonds to suit your budget. Diamond Imports is a foundation member of the Diamond Dealers Club of Australia, and you will deal directly with Daniel throughout.