The Princess is a brilliant-style shape with sharp, uncut corners. It is typically cut perfectly square, rather than as a rectangle. Brilliant style refers to vertical direction crown and pavilion facets instead of the older, step-style horizontal-direction facets. It is a straight edged square with pavilion facets that are wide at the culet and narrowed toward the girdle, the opposite of the pavilion-facet arrangement on a curved-corner radiant. The Princess was developed in 1980-81 by Betzalel Ambar and Israel Itzkowitz, of the Los Angeles-based cutting and manufacturing company, Ambar. At the time it was invented, it was considered avant garde.

A Princess generally has 76 facets, giving it more brilliance and fire than a round brilliant. The best cut proportion is a perfect, equal-sided square, or 1: 1. Cutting a Princess generally results in a yield of 60 to 62 percent, which is a better weight retention than a round. Much of the time, the octahedron rough can be sawn in half, yielding two Princesses from one stone, with the top of the rough stone becoming the table of the two resulting Princesses.