Five Fun Facts About Diamonds to Impress Your Friends and Family
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Diamonds are beautiful, expensive gemstones, and often they are discussed with something like awe, and wistful longing. But here are five fun facts about diamonds that you can drop into a conversation to lighten up the mood – or perhaps steer the conversation towards diamond engagement rings in a subtle way!
Carbon Plus Something
Diamonds are made from carbon and the purest diamonds, which are usually the best jewellery quality gemstones, are made from 99.9% carbon. But if the stones have just a hint of another element mixed into the carbon, they can pick up beautiful deep colours that give your diamonds a unique and distinctive look. These stones make up around ten percent of the jewellery quality stones that are mined all around the world, making them not only beautiful but even rare than traditional transparent or colourless diamonds, see the gradings on this diamond color chart. This is something that couples are interested in, hoping to find that special colour that encapsulates their unique relationship. Diamonds can be almost any colour with yellow and brown being the most common of the rare coloured diamonds, then orange, blue, green, and then finally pink and red.
Links to X-Men!
The word diamond comes from the Greek Adamus, meaning hard. This word root also gives us the Marvel Universe’s adamantium, from which Wolverine’s famous claws are made. Or covered, at least, along with much of his skeleton. Just think where the movie directors could have gone had they made this link themselves? Twilight gave us sparkly vampires, imagine Wolverine with glittering diamond blades giving us a sparkling X-Man?
Chips are Down
Perhaps Wolverine is better off with adamantium rather than diamond after all. Diamond is famously known as being one of the strongest substances out there – but it is also brittle. So, while diamond will cut glass and scratch most other hard surfaces, it is still vulnerable to blows, such as being hit with a hammer, and will fracture or chip if this happens. Many jewellers have horror stories about large and very expensive diamond rings being brought back badly chipped or damaged within a month of purchase. This is because the new owners assume that their new diamond can handle anything, and unwisely try out a test or two on their purchase…
Mainly Industrial
We tend to think of diamond mines producing large, beautiful stones with every load of ore that is brought to the surface, but in fact, the large jewel-worthy stones actually quite rare in a diamond miner’s day. Some 80% of the diamonds brought to the surface will be used purely for industrial purposes, while of the remaining 20%, only a small number will be deemed good enough to be sent for high value cutting and shaping. This means that each and every diamond that makes it into a jewellers purview is special!
Mythic Truths
The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that diamonds were the tears of the gods or perhaps splinters of fallen stars. This last point is perhaps not so very far from the truth as astronomers believe there is a diamond the size of the moon in outer space. BPM37093 – also known as ‘Lucy’ from the Beatles song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ – is thought to have a tremendous diamond as its core. A ten billion-trillion-trillion-carat diamond – how’s that for bling?
So, there you have it: five fun facts to drop into a conversation about the beautiful glittering gemstones that have enthralled humans since the first rainbow gleam caught our eye, hundreds of thousands of years ago!
