Right, you’re on Diamond Ring Company website, looking for a diamond pendant or engagement ring… but what is it about the diamond in these that so attracts you? Is it those flashes of colour that come off when you turn the ring on your hand? Is it the fact that you need to blink hard while inspecting?

loose diamondsThese visual ‘wow’ elements are all down to the properties that all diamonds possess. First the technical terms and then the why and how: It is actually true that you can be ‘blinded’ by a diamond. This is down to its lustre. And that is down to the property mentioned last week – its physical property hardness. What does one have to do with the other?

Hardness dictates how much light is reflected off the surface of a material. Due to Diamond’s incredible natural hardness (created by the way the carbon atoms sit together in a diamond crystal), a lot of light bounces off it. It is this amount of light that gives a diamond, loose or set, its amazing lustre. In everyday life most objects do not reflect light the way diamonds do and hence our eyes are not used to such intensity…and hence the split second need to close ones eyes when twirling a diamond under bright light!

Over hundreds of years, humans have worked out how best to harness this feature of a diamond. It’s all in the cut. Welcome to one of the famous ‘Four Cs’.

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