All of us who have seen the classic Blake Edwards movie Breakfast at Tiffany ‘s, or better translated, Breakfast at Tiffanys , remember the elegant and fragile Audrey Hepburn singing “Moonriver” sitting on a window ledge. But what few know is that Martin Rackin, Paramount’s head of production at the time, in a preview of the film suggested removing this scene from the final cut. And they say that the sweet Audrey Hepburn jumped like a spring and, between a rain of profanity, exclaimed: “over my corpse” . In this way the song composed by the unforgettable Henry Mancini has gone down in history.
The film, inspired by a Truman Capote novel, was to star Marilyn Monroe. In fact, the script had been written with her in mind. But when he found out that the protagonist was a prostitute, he declined the offer that fell into the hands of Audrey Hepburn. In this way Hepburn, with her high bun, her black Givenchy dress and her cigarette, became one of the icons of 20th century American cinema.
Diamonds, whose name comes from the Greek adamas (unalterable) , are the most peculiar of the rocks and minerals that we can find on the planet. Along with sapphires, rubies, and emeralds form the quadriumvirate of gemstones. They are the hardest known substance in the universe and four times harder than rubies or sapphires. In the rough it has the appearance of a worthless crystalline rock , they can even be confused with other rocks such as obsidian, and only when carved do they reveal all their splendor.
The origin of diamonds
Even in its origin, diamonds are different from other rocks: they are not formed in the earth’s crust but rather deeper, in the mantle, where the temperature reaches a thousand degrees and the pressure exceeds 50 times the pressure that exists in the atmosphere. the deepest ocean chasm. There are very likely billions of carats of diamonds under our feet, but only a few reach the surface. They do it by fluke, in huge explosions that launch the magma at supersonic speeds through the so-called kimberlite chimneys. Its point of exit to the surface is absolutely random: one could appear in the garden of your house .
Its only problem is that you shouldn’t confuse it with other types of rock, such as obsidian . Or worse yet, believing that it is obsidian when in fact it is a diamond. Distinguishing it does not require a refined technique; you can use the one they used in ancient India. There they observed it under a tree or at night, with the dim light of the penumbra: if it is a diamond, it will shine more brilliantly and more stable than in broad daylight . This fact is something to keep in mind if we are going to buy a diamond: the lamps of the less scrupulous dealers have a bluish tint that makes the diamonds sparkle more than they would in broad daylight.
The oldest diamond
India is the country that has supplied the world with these gemstones for most of history. This is where the oldest known diamond comes from: the Indian Briolette . Its first owner was Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen consort of the French King Louis VII around 1140. Its purity is such that it is often referred to as “the purest of the pure”. After the divorce she married Henry II of England with whom she had 8 children, one of them Richard the Lionheart, and it is speculated that he took the diamond to the crusades. After that, all reference is lost for three centuries, although it is thought that it passed through the hands of Catherine de Medicis, wife of Henry II of France. At the beginning of the 20th century it was cut and sold to the Cartier brothers (Louis, Alfred and Pierre) together with another famous diamond, the Blue Heart. Since then he has passed through the hands of various fortunes on both sides of the Atlantic, and the last time he was seen in public was in 1970 at a dinner for fashion magazine editors in New York. Today it is believed to be in the hands of a wealthy European family.
Something very curious is that there is practically no second-hand market for diamonds , despite the fact that half of the men on the planet buy them at the moment when they can barely afford it. Today it is a symbol of love, but there was a time when they were believed to be poisonous , a fable that was most likely spread by the owners of the mines so that their workers would not steal them by swallowing them.
a diamond is forever
That the diamond is a symbol of love between two people was something carefully planned in the mid-1940s, when the large company that controlled the diamond market, the Dutch De Beers, commissioned a survey of more than 5,000 American adults and discovered that very few associated diamonds with engagement rings, a market dominated by gems such as rubies, sapphires or turquoise. The situation had to be turned around and for this he hired the advertising company NW Ayer, which launched its campaign based on French paintings of romantic places. And it didn’t work.
But one afternoon in April 1947 everything changed. A young creative from the company named Frances Gerety had stayed on to finish the job: the client was waiting for a tagline. According to her own account, she lowered her head and said, “please God, give me a hand.” Then he sat up and wrote: “A Diamond is Forever”, a diamond is forever. The slogan catapulted the diamond market . Gerety’s phrase has been translated into more than 30 languages and thanks to it, about 80% of couples who get engaged in marriage in the United States, Europe and Japan do so with a diamond.
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 to fix “a diamond at the focus of a burning lens” to see what would happen. The scientists did so and watched as it broke, sparkled, and finally disappeared without a trace or trace of its existence. Put in an oven at high temperatures, the tray where it was deposited came out with nothing to prove its existence. What had happened? We had to wait for the great Lavoisier to understand what was happening: burned before an unlimited source of oxygen, they were completely converted into carbon dioxide. Why this was so was beyond his understanding, until in 1796 the chemist Smithson Tennant came up with the solution: diamonds were made of the same element as carbon . As a journalist once wrote, the diamond is graphite with a good day.
It is curious that one of the most popular misconceptions about diamonds is that, being 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 a large number of emeralds, assuming that the real ones had the same false indestructibility as the diamond. In fact, nephritic jade, with a 6.5 on the Mohs hardness scale, can hardly be broken with a hammer even though it has. The diamond, on a 10, can be shattered in one hit .
Reference:
Newmann, N. (2021) Diamonds: Their History, Sources, Qualities and Benefits, Firefly Books
