In the world, there are few natural elements that represent wealth. One is gold; there are no doubts about that. And then we have it: that transparent, glittering stone, with a structure so perfect that it seems impossible it was created by nature in a completely spontaneous way. I am talking about the diamond, that small precious stone that women view as the Holy Grail and men view as the devil himself.

That small fortune (because a diamond can be worth millions) is something for which people risk their lives and kill just to gain control and ownership of it. If you think about it, thieves, the good ones, often try to rob jewelry stores, bank safety deposit boxes, or armored cars to intercept diamonds to be laundered and resold on the black market or through alternative routes. Or, on a much larger scale, first-world nations go so far as to destabilize an entire third-world country just to grab extraction rights. Today, with this post, I want to ask myself, "But what is a diamond really?" Where does it pop out from, and why does everyone want it?

It flows really well. It hooks perfectly into the next part that we have already seen (the origins of the name and the double definition).

What is a diamond?

Before talking about what this transparent stone actually is, I would like to dwell on the origin of its name, because it embodies an idea of absolute perfection. In fact, the word "diamond" derives from the ancient Greek "adamas," which means "invincible" or "indomitable." This name was chosen because, in antiquity, nothing was able to scratch it.

Today we know that its indestructibility is partial: while it is true that it is almost impossible to scratch or scrape (it can only be scratched by another diamond), it is not equally resistant to impacts. Paradoxically, you don't need a hydraulic press at insane pressures to break it: a decisive hammer blow in the right spot is enough to shatter it. Otherwise, in daily use, it remains an eternal and unbeatable material.

At this point, the question arises spontaneously: what is, in fact, a diamond? To answer, I want to use two definitions: a purely technical one and a decidedly more romantic one.

The technical one tells us that the diamond is one of the allotropic forms of carbon. Allotropic forms? And what on earth could that be? I admit that at the beginning I had no idea what it meant, but after a very brief search I figured it out. Simply put, it means it is a mineral composed exclusively of carbon atoms arranged in an extremely rigid crystalline structure. In a diamond, each carbon atom is bonded to four other atoms through very strong covalent bonds—which means that the atoms share their electrons, putting them in common. This arrangement creates a perfect cubic lattice, which gives the material its incredible strength.

The romantic one, on the other hand, states that diamonds are the second life of a star that is no more. And I am not joking! In stars that have reached an advanced stage of their life, helium nuclei fuse at unimaginable temperatures and pressures to form carbon nuclei. When these stars die or explode into supernovas, they disperse that carbon into space in the form of dust and gas. It is the exact same matter that billions of years ago formed our solar system, the Earth, and ourselves. Since diamonds are made of pure carbon, that stone is nothing other than a piece of an ancient star, enclosed and guarded in the heart of our planet.

Most of the diamonds we see today in jewelry stores are between 1 and 3.5 billion years old. They were created when the Earth was still very young, long before the appearance of the dinosaurs.

Wearing a diamond means, literally, carrying a piece of primordial geological history on you.

Characteristics.

The diamond is hard. At this point, men will exclaim, "Yes, but never as hard as me, though!" only to then discover from their girlfriends that it is not like that at all. But we are talking about the diamond here! Let's not get lost in misleading talk.

The diamond is the hardest known natural material. On the Mohs Scale, which measures scratch resistance, it occupies grade 10 (the maximum). It is no coincidence that about 80% of mined diamonds (the less pure ones) are used for drill bits, industrial saws, and abrasives to cut other hard materials.

It would also be strange if it weren't so! Man, understood as the male gender, loves to break things, and when he doesn't succeed, he racks his brain to make it happen. The diamond could not be scratched or defeated by other materials (something decidedly frustrating for us), but on the bright side, it could destroy everything else. In short, you find yourself holding something that you cannot consume, but that consumes everything it touches. Wouldn't you want to use it to break, cut, or smooth materials that are otherwise incorruptible?

Furthermore, it is an excellent thermal conductor (four times better than copper). A little curiosity: in English, diamonds are often called "ice." This slang term is born precisely from its incredible thermal conductivity. The diamond transmits heat so quickly that if you touch it with your tongue or your fingers, it extracts heat from your body instantly, giving you a sensation of glacial cold. I wonder what would happen if someone found a diamond as big as a person and hugged it... Maybe we should gift it to the current world enemy number one!

Finally, the diamond has a very high refractive index. This means that light, entering the stone, is slowed down and deflected drastically, creating that typical "sparkle" (or "fire") that activates only when the cut is executed to perfection. There is a reason, after all, why in jewelry stores these stones are always displayed inside display cases illuminated to the millimeter: a diamond that glitters is a diamond sold.

Precisely based on this aesthetic performance, the value of every single stone is established on the market through the famous "4 Cs": Carat (weight), Cut, Color, and Clarity. The more a diamond achieves high scores in these four parameters, the more its price shoots to the stars. I know it may seem like something obvious to experts, but for the sake of the record and the wallet, it was a detail that absolutely had to be put down in black and white.

Formation.

As with all things in the universe, the more beautiful something is, the more intense the process behind it is to obtain that beauty.

Just to give a very simple example, those sculpted bodies we see in the gym or on Instagram are by no means obtained by chance! It takes hard work, both on the machines and with photographic filters.

The exact same thing goes for diamonds. Natural diamonds form at great depths (between 150 and 200 kilometers below the earth's surface), where pressures and temperatures (over 1000°C) are extreme enough to compress carbon into that perfect crystalline form.

But if they are created at such great depths and under such extreme pressures, how do they then arrive in the windows of jewelry stores? No, we certainly do not go all the way down there to retrieve them. We are not yet capable of drilling so deep, and we do not have the right equipment to work eight hours a day at a thousand degrees of temperature. The Earth itself took care of it: diamonds arrived at the surface thanks to particular ancient and incredibly fast volcanic eruptions, which pushed magma and stones upward, creating the so-called "kimberlite pipes," where today man can finally extract them, or they can be found anywhere thanks to erosion: over the course of millions of years, wind and rain have crumbled the volcanic rocks that contained the stones. The diamonds, indestructible, remained intact, and rivers dragged them downstream, amassing them together with the sand in the beds of watercourses. Keep this detail of erosion in mind.

History.

As with gold, it is impossible to indicate an exact date for the "discovery" of the diamond; being accidental discoveries in multiple parts of the world, it is difficult to define the precise day on which a material was discovered. What we can do is understand when and how these stones were used in history. We know for certain, through historical artifacts, that these stones were known as far back as antiquity.

The origins in India.

Do you still have erosion in mind? Perfect, because it is the backbone of the power of ancient India. For centuries, India was the only known source of diamonds in the world. The first written testimonies about the diamond date back in fact to 4th-century BC India. In ancient Sanskrit texts, this stone was called Vajra (which means "thunderbolt" or "indestructible"). Already at that time, it was noted how incredibly hard the material was.

The way they were collected is almost paradoxical, because it has nothing to do with deep mines, lava, or volcanoes. The Indians simply exploited the heavy work done by nature along the rivers: millennial erosion tore diamonds from the rock and deposited them in alluvial beds, ready to be collected. This geological stroke of luck was used to literally drain the coffers of other kingdoms. The stones were traded along the Silk Road toward China and the Roman Empire at absurd prices, precisely because of their rarity. At the time, only what was found by chance was sold, and, in essence, the Indians had an absolute monopoly on production: for the ancient world, they were exactly what the Persian Gulf is today for oil.

The comical thing is that history has completely flipped. If for nearly two millennia Europe had to fork out fortunes to buy diamonds from India, today we produce many of those diamonds by ourselves, artificially in the laboratory, stripping India of its monopoly on creation and sale.

From Antiquity to the Middle Ages: The Symbol of Power.

Due to trade on the Silk Road, the Roman Empire also came into contact with the diamond. Pliny the Elder, in the 1st century AD, described it as "the most valuable, not only of precious stonesbut also of all things in the world," already noting its extreme hardness and perfection.

However, whether it was India, Rome, or any other nation doing business along the Silk Road, no one yet had a clear idea of what they actually had in their hands. Initially, the diamond was not associated with romance or modern industry, but with invincible strength and protection, precisely because of its immutability and brilliance. Thanks to its hardness, it already found a place in the hands of the most skilled craftsmen, who used it to engrave and cut materials that were otherwise impossible to scratch. At the same time, it was believed to confer courage in battle, which is why it was worn as a talisman. It was an exclusively male stone, flaunted by kings and emperors as a symbol of divine authority.

Once the Roman Empire fell and the Middle Ages began, this mystical aura was by no means lost. Throughout the medieval millennium, it was thought that the diamond even had healing powers or that it could reveal marital infidelity. It was a rare, almost mythological object, accessible only to the highest social hierarchies. Practically, the diamond was an ibuprofen and a lie detector at the same time.

The more I write this post, the more I realize that the Middle Ages were truly a crazy time: they didn't really understand much, they tried to convert lead into gold, and they believed that diamonds cured diseases and revealed the truth. What a fascinating period.

The scientific turning point (18th century).

For millennia we used diamonds as talismans (the most expensive good-luck charms in history), to cut things, and to cure people (total wonder), but for a very long time, no one truly understood their real scientific nature. Although they had been known for millennia, no one knew what they were made of. It was known that they were hard, but the understanding of their chemistry remained a mystery for centuries.

The discovery of their composition happened very late. In 1772, the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier discovered that the diamond is composed of simple carbon. He did it with an experiment almost like a mad scientist: he burned a diamond by focusing sunlight with a powerful lens and proved that the only product of the combustion was carbon dioxide.

Two decades later, in 1797, the English scientist Smithson Tennant confirmed the experiment, proving an incredible thing: the diamond and the graphite of pencils, despite their completely opposite appearance, are made of the exact same substance.

These two discoveries, however, did not immediately change the market. Now humanity finally knew what that magical stone was made of, but diamonds still remained exclusive to a very few kings, nobles, and craftsmen. No one had yet set their mind on creating a global market or using them on an industrial scale in factories, simply because they were still too rare to make large investments in them.

Discoveries in modern times.

The history of the diamond as we know it today changes radically in 1867, a period in which colonial powers were marching at great speed toward the conquest of Africa. On a day like any other, something incredible happens: in South Africa, on the banks of the Orange River, a boy named Erasmus Jacobs finds a glittering stone that would turn out to be a rough diamond. This single discovery generates two enormous effects that will change the world forever.

The first is the definitive end of the myth of Indian exclusivity: that stone was irrefutable proof that diamonds could be found elsewhere too.

The second effect, a direct consequence of the first, is that the world went totally out of its mind. A true "diamond rush" thus began. This obsessive search, starting right from South Africa, would lead over time to the discovery of colossal deposits in other areas of the African continent and, later in the twentieth century, even in Russia and Australia, laying the foundations for the mass trade and industrial-scale extraction that dominated the entire 20th century.

The Revolution of "A Diamond is Forever."

At that point it was clear: the diamond was no longer so rare, given that large quantities were being found in many corners of the planet. Furthermore, science had proven that it was not a divine material but just a very mundane piece of carbon. With these premises, one would have expected a vertical collapse of its value. And yet, quite the opposite. Today there are tiny diamonds that can be worth tens of thousands of dollars. The reason? Pure marketing.

The true turning point for the diamond was not in quantity but in the ability to transform its physical characteristic—being eternal—into the symbol of love. The modern perception of the diamond as an "obligation" for engagement is one of the most successful cases of psychological manipulation and marketing in history.

It all started with De Beers, the mining company that for nearly a century controlled the entire world market. When the huge mines in South Africa were discovered at the end of the nineteenth century, the market office risked being flooded, with a potential collapse in prices. De Beers was born precisely to monopolize those mines, deciding from time to time how many stones to place on the market to keep them artificially rare.

But the absolute masterpiece came in 1947, when the advertising agency N.W. Ayer created the slogan "A diamond is forever" for them. The idea was brilliant: to link the physical indestructibility of the stone to the eternity of the sentimental bond. From that moment on, the diamond became a social rite of passage. The size of the stone has often been interpreted (incorrectly) as a measure of economic success or the intensity of the partner's commitment.

When later, in 1954, General Electric created the first synthetic diamond by replicating the very high pressures of the subsoil in the laboratory, no one cared much about this progress. Sure, it was an incredible moment for science, but the public didn't care: the value of the diamond no longer revolved only around geology (which, nevertheless, influenced its price) but around its social status. At that point, what mattered was the perceived quality: the more a diamond is "pure" according to the rules of the market, the more its value shoots to the stars, even if out there there are tons of identical carbon.

Today, the diamond occupies a central place in the aesthetics of success. In the world of hip-hop and show business, for example, it has become the ultimate ostentation of achieved wealth. But for many, owning a diamond today means above all admiring man's definitive triumph over nature.

The Paradigm Shift: Ethics and Sustainability.

However, even for diamonds, we have a dark page. In recent decades, the social conception has become more critical and complex. I am talking about "Blood Diamonds", that set of films and journalistic investigations that raised public awareness about diamonds coming from conflict zones, leading to the creation of the Kimberley Process to certify ethical origin.

Furthermore, a new social perception is growing that views synthetic diamonds (produced in the lab) as a more ecological and ethical choice, given that they change nothing compared to "natural" ones, being produced in the same way. This is challenging the idea that only a "mined" stone is real or precious, shifting the value from the "prestige of the rare" to the "science of perfection."

Curiosities.

I wanted to write this piece of the post because there are a couple of things that fascinated me during my research for this post. What I realized is that the diamond is an object that challenges the laws of physics in truly bizarre ways. Here are some of the most fascinating curiosities:

Rain of diamonds in space.

If for us the diamond was a "rare" mirage for millennia, we must not make the mistake of thinking of its rarity as a universal law. In deep space, things change drastically. On planets like Uranus and Neptune, conditions are so extreme—between gigantic pressures and an abundance of methane—that scientists hypothesize an incredible phenomenon: it literally rains diamonds in there.

These carbon crystals would form in the atmosphere and then plummet toward the planet's core like a sort of precious hail. Imagine the scene: you are enjoying a summer afternoon on Uranus (assuming you can survive temperatures of -200°C and winds at a thousand miles an hour), and you witness a storm of pure diamonds. You would immediately want to collect them in a bucket to take them home and become the richest person on Earth. The comical thing, however, is that if one day we truly managed to make an interstellar journey and empty that bucket on our planet, the market would collapse instantly: diamonds would become so common as to be used to pave roads.

The diamond planet.

If the diamond storms on Uranus seem incredible to you, know that the universe has gone much further. In the constellation of Cancer, there is an exoplanet called 55 Cancri e, which orbits a star similar to our Sun.

This world is a "Super-Earth" with a radius twice that of our planet and a mass a whopping eight times higher. But the real madness is its composition: astronomers' observations suggest that at least one-third of the entire planet is composed of pure carbon which, due to hellish temperatures (close to 2000 °C) and monstrous pressures, exists entirely in the form of crystallized diamond. An entire planet of diamond.

Some economists tried to make a theoretical calculation of its market value: the figure revolves around 26 nonillion dollars (a 26 followed by thirty zeros). A valuation that goes beyond all human imagination and makes any De Beers vault on Earth look ridiculous. In comparison, the entire economy of our planet would not be enough to buy a single square millimeter of it.

They are "softer" than the sun.

Despite their reputation for indestructibility, diamonds are actually unstable on the Earth's surface. Physics hears no reason and does not get moved by romance: at the atomic level, the diamond cannot wait to go back to being writing carbon. From a thermodynamic point of view, in fact, the diamond tends spontaneously to transform into graphite. Fortunately for those who own an engagement ring, this process requires millions (or billions) of years at normal temperatures, but technically diamonds are not "forever" at all.

A very strong push of heat in the right place is enough to accelerate the process, and that very precious symbol of eternal love will transform, very unromantically, into the tip of a gray pencil.

They can be of all colors.

Although the white (colorless) diamond is the most famous, natural diamonds exist in every color of the rainbow. The rarest of all are red diamonds: there are very few specimens in the world, and their value is incalculable. Blue diamonds, on the other hand, owe their color to the presence of trace amounts of boron.

The "Cullinan" diamond.

I wanted to close the list of peculiarities with a simple question: what is the largest diamond ever found on Earth?

The absolute record goes to the Cullinan, discovered in South Africa in 1905. Rough, it weighed a beauty of 3,106 carats (about 621 grams, practically like a loaf of bread). Given the impossibility of working it whole, it was cut into several smaller stones, the largest of which today are part of the British Crown Jewels and are set permanently in the scepter and the royal crown.

The current value? Estimating it is impossible, but we are comfortably talking about several hundreds of millions of dollars. In short: more than everything we own combined.

Small reflections.

And so, to return to the question from which we started: what is, at the end of the day, a diamond?

It is the most expensive illusion in the world, but also one of the most fascinating engineering wonders of nature and science. It is a piece of a dead star that the Earth guarded for billions of years in its womb, which man has bathed in blood out of lust for power, which marketing has transformed into the customary tollbooth of love, and which today technology manages to recreate in a climate-controlled laboratory by pressing a button.

Perhaps the true charm of the diamond does not lie in the stone itself but in the fact that it embodies all our contradictions: we adore what is indestructible while knowing that, deep down, it only desires to go back to being the humble carbon of a pencil. Therefore, the next time you look at one shining under the lights of a jewelry store, do not see just a price with many zeros or a status symbol. See in it a little piece of infinity that has made an incredible journey through time, space, and human cunning, only to end up trapped on a finger. And perhaps, at that point, that insane price will seem a shred more justified to you. Or perhaps not, and you will continue to agree with De Beers (or with your bank account).

M.