The drawing comes back and the stone has been turned on its side. Same emerald cut, same band, rotated ninety degrees so the long axis runs across your finger instead of up it. It reads as a small flourish, the sort of thing a designer does to make a familiar ring look considered.

It is a larger decision than that. An east west engagement ring discards the one effect elongated shapes are usually recommended for, and it moves the most fragile parts of the stone to the side of your hand that actually collides with things. Neither is a reason to avoid it. They are simply not what gets said when the drawing arrives.

An East West Engagement Ring Trades Length for Width

Ask why anyone chooses an oval, a marquise, a pear or an emerald cut and the answer comes back as something about the hand. GIA says it plainly: an oval "flatters the hand by making fingers appear longer and more slender", a marquise "flatters the finger by making it appear longer and more slender", and the emerald cut's elongated outline has "a flattering effect on the hand, creating the illusion of longer, more slender fingers".

Every one of those claims depends on the stone being set the long way up the finger. Turn it sideways and the illusion does not weaken, it reverses. The stone's longest dimension now runs across the finger rather than along it, so instead of extending the hand it spans it.

What you gain is a different sort of presence. The stone reads as a horizontal line rather than a vertical one, and it covers more of the finger's width without covering any more finger overall. The face-up area has not changed, and neither has anything else about the stone. Only the direction your eye travels when it looks at it.

This is not a fringe arrangement. GIA lists east-west among the settings worth considering for an oval, illustrates a marquise set in what it calls an "east/west" orientation instead of "north/south", and notes that an emerald cut can be set vertically or "horizontally, also known as 'east-west' setting". The trade is well understood. It is just rarely described as a trade.

The Bow-Tie Turns With the Stone

Most elongated brilliant cuts carry a bow-tie: a dark shadow lying across the middle of the stone. GIA describes it in ovals as a "darkened 'bowtie' shape", and in marquise cuts as "a dark shadow that resembles a bow-tie across the width of the diamond".

It is not a flaw in the material. It appears when light heading into the stone is blocked on the way in, and according to GIA the thing doing the blocking is "your own head and shoulders" as you lean over to look. A well-cut oval minimises it, but GIA is clear that "some degree of bow tie is always present".

Because the shadow is a product of the faceting, it belongs to the stone rather than to the ring, and it rotates when the stone does. Set north-south, a bow-tie lies across your finger. Set east-west, the same shadow runs along it. Whether that is an improvement depends on the stone in front of you, which is rather the point: it is a thing to look at, not a thing to reason about.

Proportions travel badly across the rotation too. GIA puts most ovals between 1.30:1 and 1.50:1, calling the lower end a "gently elongated look that flatters most fingers", and notes that ovals beyond 1.50:1 are rarely seen because they are impractical to cut. A marquise runs closer to 2:1, with most submitted to GIA between 1.6:1 and 2.2:1. Those ranges came from people looking at stones set the conventional way. A 2:1 marquise lying across a finger is a different object from a 2:1 marquise pointing up one, and the number that sounded elegant in the first case tells you little about the second.

The Points End Up Where Your Hand Hits Things

GIA is blunt about geometry and damage. "Any shape of diamond with points or sharp corners is more exposed to chipping at those locations." Corners on emerald cuts, radiants and princess cuts are singled out as higher risk, the princess corners especially because they "lie close to the cleavage plane". Girdles matter too: a thicker girdle is harder to chip, and thin places at the corners and points are at much higher risk.

Now rotate the stone. Set the usual way, the points of a pear or a marquise sit at twelve and six o'clock, tucked between your knuckle and the back of your hand, running along the finger where relatively little arrives to meet them. Set east-west, those same points move to three and nine, projecting toward your neighbouring fingers. That is the axis on which a ring meets a door frame, the inside of a pocket, the edge of a bench. The vulnerable geometry has not changed. Its exposure has.

The remedy is the ordinary one, and it becomes more relevant rather than less. GIA's own advice is that "vulnerable points or corners are better protected with bezels, partial bezels, or V-shaped prongs", and some cutters finish marquise ends with French tips for the same reason. Turn a pointed stone sideways and the V-claws follow the points around to three and nine, or you look seriously at a partial bezel across those ends. Setting it with four plain claws on the corners because that looked clean in the render is how stones get chipped.

Sapphire Does Not Carry the Same Risk, and We Would Say That

All of the above is a diamond argument, and diamond's particular weakness is cleavage: it is tough in some crystal directions and much less so in others. Corundum has no such plane. GIA's description is that sapphire "has excellent toughness and no cleavage", sits at 9 on the Mohs scale, and is therefore "a great choice for rings and other mountings subject to daily wear" — the property behind our earlier piece on sapphires and everyday wear. A pointed sapphire turned east-west and a princess-cut diamond turned east-west are not carrying comparable risk, and should not be discussed as though they were.

We work mostly in Australian sapphires and in cuts that follow the rough rather than a catalogue, both of which take to east-west setting particularly well. Read that paragraph with the obvious conflict of interest in view.

One thing rotation does not fix. Step cuts are the shapes most often turned sideways, and GIA notes that the long rectangular facets of an emerald cut "make inclusions more easily visible compared to other diamond cuts" while the reduced scintillation makes colour "more prominent". Turning the stone changes none of that, and it puts that broad flat table across the widest part of your view. A step cut you would not have bought north-south does not improve by being laid on its side, which is worth remembering when the conversation turns to what you can and cannot see without a loupe.

To be straight about the category: there is no technical case for east-west, and it neither protects the stone nor improves the light. The honest reason to do it is that you prefer looking at it. Any studio presenting a rotation as engineering, ourselves included if we ever do, is dressing up a preference.

What to Ask Before You Turn the Stone

Four questions that will settle it faster than more pictures will.

• How is the head being made for this orientation? A rotated stone needs a head drawn for it. You want to hear that the claws, and the V-claws if there are points, have been positioned for the new axis rather than inherited from the north-south version.
• How far does the stone sit past the sides of my finger? An east-west stone spends its length across a finger that is only so wide. Some overhang is normal and part of the look. A great deal of it is something you should see before it is made.
• What happens where the band meets the setting? Turned sideways, the stone presents its narrow dimension to the shank, so that junction is short and abrupt where the conventional version is long and gradual. It has to be designed, not left to resolve itself.
• Can I see it on my hand, in daylight, before it is approved? A rendering is drawn from directly overhead. Nobody looks at your ring from directly overhead.

Where This Leaves You

East-west is a design decision rather than a styling detail, and it is worth making deliberately. It gives up the lengthening effect that sends most people toward an elongated stone in the first place, and offers width and an unfamiliar line in exchange. It rotates the bow-tie. It moves any points onto the busiest axis of your hand, which makes the setting choice more consequential than it would otherwise be.

The way to decide is not to read more about it. Have the same stone held both ways against your own hand, in daylight, and see which one you keep looking back at. If the answer is the sideways one, that is the ring, and none of the trade-offs above should talk you out of it. They should just be things you knew about first.

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Laher is a bespoke jewellery studio in Surry Hills, Sydney. We design and handcraft engagement rings and fine jewellery using Australian sapphires and unique coloured diamonds.