“This is an important moment of my life,” cries Bobak Nasrollahi. The jewelry entrepreneur is dressed in a sharply tailored double-breasted suit and bathed in the soft sunshine that filters into his office in Florence, of which he is an official ambassador. He is also an ambassador of Vinci, a town in the Italian hills of Montalbano.
Nasrollahi has all the charm and exuberance you would expect to find in a hot-blooded Italian, yet although he grew up here and greedily absorbed all the culture and history Italy had to offer, he hails from a Jewish family with Iranian roots and diamonds in its blood. His grandfather was jeweler to the Shah of Iran, and the Nasrollahi Moghadam family has been in the business ever since.
The family company, Amin Luxury, has headquarters in Florence, Valencia and New York, as well as distributors across Europe. The business sells diamonds with bespoke cuts, such as the pentagonal Angel Star and the five-pointed Rising Star. It also created Diamond Luxury Memory — stones engraved with hidden QR codes that can unlock personal videos.
The latest diamond to join the Amin Luxury roster, and the project that has whipped Nasrollahi into a fever today, is the Leonardo Da Vinci Cut, which he believes is the 21st century’s answer to the round brilliant. His diamond cut is so named because its invention was not Nasrollahi’s, but that of the world-famous Italian polymath Leonardo Da Vinci — or at least, that’s who provided the road map for it.
The book that started it all“This is a very old book, and it cost me a lot of money,” says Nasrollahi, holding up an agreeably ancient-looking copy of Da Vinci’s
De Divina Proportione. The tome, written in Latin, explores his mathematical theory of Divine Proportion, also known as the Golden Ratio, in which the ratio of two quantities is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities. This is complicated for non-mathematicians — and diamond shoppers — to absorb, but the gist of it is a numerical proportion that is shorthand for beauty. Start looking into it, and you’ll find it everywhere, from natural petal formations to the Taj Mahal.
While poring over his purchase, Nasrollahi was struck by one of the geometric sketches within. “It looked like an old-cut [diamond],” he says, pointing out the sketch. “I thought, why don’t I try with the technology of today to cut rough [diamonds] to Divine Proportions? So that’s what I started to do.”
Making the gradeNasrollahi partnered with Sri Lankan diamond cutting firm and De Beers sightholder The Niru Group to see if the formula would work. It did. “When I first held the cut in my hand, I said, ‘Oh, wow, it’s incredible,’” he recalls.
Worried he was too close to the project, he had it independently appraised, and the results showed the cut to be a triple Ex — excellent cut, excellent symmetry, excellent polish. It also created an illusion of brilliance that Nasrollahi believes makes the diamonds seem up to 20% bigger: A pentagon and three stars are plainly visible on the table of the diamond, without the need for a loupe.
The Leonardo Da Vinci cut is a round diamond, but Nasrollahi declares it is a different diamond altogether than the round brilliant that dominates the market. And the labs agree. Amin Luxury already has a deal in place with the International Gemological Institute (IGI), which grades qualifying cuts as “Leonardo Da Vinci” rather than “modified round,” the designation that all other rounds with additional facets receive. Since the beginning of the year, fellow labs HRD Antwerp and the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) have added the description to their grading reports.
‘We are writing history’The price of these diamonds is currently about 10% higher than standard round brilliants, though this will go down as production increases, says Nasrollahi, since the manufacturing costs of cutting are only 1.9% higher. At the moment, production levels sit at one million stones a year, and Nasrollahi says he has the capacity to increase this whenever demand hits. He would love to sign a bulk deal with a major global brand like Tiffany & Co. to expedite the cut’s popularity, as well as see it grow organically through retailers.
Leonardo Da Vinci diamonds have already hit the market in Europe, launching in Italy nearly two years ago, where more than 200 sellers have it in stock. The brand now has its sights set on the US — where launch plans are scheduled for the second half of 2018 — as well as the rest of the globe.
Though Nasrollahi chuckles when asked if world domination is in the business plan, he is unabashedly ambitious. “This stone will replace the round brilliant,” he says seriously. “We are writing history in this moment. Who said the Tolkowsky round brilliant has to be forever? Before it, we had the old cut, rose cut, half cut. Over the centuries, we have changed the brilliance of the stone. This stone is the next generation of diamonds.”
Image: Amin LuxuryArticle from the Rapaport Magazine - January 2018. To subscribe click here.