What is a Brilliani house cut?
A house cut is a facet design Brilliani Labs developed itself, rather than a shape or a trade standard. There are five: BL-Miliano, BL-Rafaello, BL-Girandola, BL-Anteros and BL-M5. Each is measured on the same ray census as every other cut on this site and published term by term against Tolkowsky's 1919 ideal round brilliant, so the claim can be checked rather than taken on trust.
Which house cut performs best?
In diamond, BL-Miliano at 93.28 Global, +4.68 against the standard, the widest margin in the registry. In moissanite the order changes and BL-M5 leads at 95.13. A cut is solved against a refractive index, so no single design leads in every material.
How much of the house cuts’ margin is just facet count?
A large part of it, and we publish that rather than hide it. Scintillation on this engine is a pure function of the number of facets that reach the surface, so a cut carrying 145 or 201 facets banks roughly 2.4 to 2.7 points against a 57-facet standard before its optics are assessed at all. Subtract that and what remains is the part the designer actually earned. Every house-cut page shows the split term by term.
Is BL-Vitruvio a house cut?
No, despite the BL name. BL-Vitruvio carries Tolkowsky's 1919 angles unchanged and belongs to the T-series, where it is the 185-facet member. It was renamed from T185 in July 2026 because it no longer follows the T-plus-facet-count naming, but its design lineage did not change.
Can I buy a diamond cut to one of these designs?
These are published cut designs measured as geometry, not stock. If you want to see one rendered and turned in real time, every house cut is available in the Index and in Compare. For anything beyond that, use the contact page.
Are these figures a laboratory cut grade?
No. They are engine measurements of a design, accurate to roughly two points, produced by Monte Carlo ray tracing on exact facet geometry at a fixed seed. They deliberately exclude the workshop: a finished stone's polish and symmetry deviation belong to the cutter and the rough, not to the design. They are not a substitute for a GIA, IGI or AGS report.
Why measure against a 1919 specification rather than a modern one?
Because we did not get to choose it. Every benchmark on a maker's own website has the same problem, that the maker picked it. Marcel Tolkowsky published the round brilliant's proportions in Diamond Design in 1919, the trade adopted them, and they are still the reference the industry argues about. The cost of that choice is that the bar is not high, which is why every margin here is published term by term rather than as one score.
What is the difference between a house cut and a diamond shape?
A shape is the outline of the stone, such as oval, cushion or emerald. A cut design is the facet plan inside that outline. All five house cuts are round brilliants, so they differ from each other in facet plan rather than in silhouette. The popular shapes are measured separately in the jewellery cuts section.