The marquise cut, in its conventional form, dates to the eighteenth century. King Louis XV reportedly commissioned a diamond cut to resemble the lips of his mistress, the Marquise de Pompadour. The shape stuck. For the next two centuries, marquise stones were cut as elongated brilliants — pointed at both ends, filled with the small, scintillating facets that produce maximum sparkle.
The Dutch Marquise is something else. It is a marquise outline filled with step-cut facets — long parallel rectangular planes — rather than the conventional brilliant pattern. Whether it is genuinely Dutch in origin is contested. Step-cut marquise stones existed in Antwerp and Amsterdam cutting workshops from at least the seventeenth century onward; whether the specific cut we now call Dutch Marquise descends directly from those traditions, or whether the name was attached retroactively to a modern revival, is unclear.
Names travel; the geometry is older than the name we now give it.
What is clear is that the cut is real and the cutting tradition behind it is real, regardless of which specific Dutch workshop you trace it to. Step-cut faceting applied to an elongated pointed outline produces a recognisable optical effect — calm, sculptural, mirror-like — that is fundamentally different from the conventional brilliant marquise. That difference is the cut, and the cut is what matters.
Where you should be sceptical is when sellers describe ordinary brilliant marquises as "Dutch" because the term sounds rare and old. A true Dutch Marquise is identifiable at a glance: the facets are large, flat, and parallel, not small and scintillating. If a stone described as Dutch Marquise has the sparkle pattern of a conventional marquise, the name is being misapplied.
Ask to see the inclusion plot on the certificate. Step-cut facets are documented as long parallel planes; brilliant facets are documented as triangular and kite-shaped. The certificate cannot lie about the cut, regardless of what the merchant calls it. This is the simplest way to verify what you are actually buying.