Diamonds, whose name comes from the Greek adámas (unalterable), are the most peculiar of the rocks and minerals that we can find on the planet. Together with sapphires, rubies and emeralds they form the quadriunvirate of precious stones. They are the hardest known substance in the universe . In the rough it has the appearance of a worthless crystalline rock, they can even be confused with others such as obsidian, and only when carving them reveal their splendor. It is that dead beauty that made Marilyn Monroe sing that they are “a girl’s best friends”, perhaps because she believed that if a man fails a woman he can at least sell his diamonds. However, it is more a wish than a reality since what is usually achieved is between a third and a fifth of the original price. Of course, half the men on the planet buy them at a time when they can barely afford it. Today it is a symbol of love but there was a time they were believed to be poisonous , a fable that the mine owners probably spread so that their workers would not steal them by swallowing them.
When did the diamond become the greatest proof of love? In 1947, commissioned by the company that monopolized the world diamond market, the South African De Beers. The year before, he had hired the Philadelphia advertising firm NW Ayer & Son to convince Americans that diamond was the perfect gem for engagement rings, and he launched a campaign based on French paintings of romantic places – it didn’t work.
One afternoon in April 1947, everything changed. A young creative from the company named Frances Gerety had stayed to finish the job: the client was waiting for a slogan, something that would set the entire campaign like a diamond on its brooch. “I lowered my head and said, ‘Please God, drop me a line.’ Then he got up and wrote: A Diamond is Forever , a diamond is forever. The slogan catapulted the diamond market into the stratosphere . Gerety’s phrase has been translated into more than 30 languages and thanks to her, about 80% of couples who get engaged in the United States, Europe and Japan do so with a diamond.
Diamond is the hardest substance, but it can be broken
Of course, a diamond is not forever. At the end of the 17th century, the Grand Duke Cosimo III asked the scientific academy of Florence, the Accademia del Cimento , to fix “a diamond in the focus of a burning lens” to see what happened. Scientists did so and watched it break, sparkle, and finally disappear without a trace . Put in an oven at high temperatures, the tray where it had been deposited came out with nothing to prove its existence. What had happened? It was necessary to wait for the great Lavoisier to understand what was happening: burned before an unlimited source of oxygen they were totally converted into carbon dioxide. Why this was so escaped his understanding, until in 1796 the chemist Smithson Tennant found the solution: diamonds were made with the same element as carbon. As journalist Victoria Finlay wrote in her book Jewels , “it’s graphite with a good day.”
It is curious that one of the most popular misconceptions of diamonds is that, because they are the hardest substances, they cannot be broken . In Roman times it was believed that only the blood of a sacrificed child could crumble it, and Pizarro and his men destroyed large amounts of emeralds, assuming that the real ones had the same false indestructibility as the diamond. In fact, nephritic jade, which is one of the hardest stones in existence, can hardly be broken with a hammer even though it is only 6.5 on the Mohs hardness scale. The diamond, on a 10, can be shattered in one hit.
