How to Tell If a Diamond is Real
"Hardness" is a rating
scale that was devised
to rate how well gems stood up to wear and tear.
The average person rarely sees a diamond of such size that they
can apply any of the more obvious tests that a jeweler or gemologist
would use in determining whether a diamond is real or not.
For the most part, we see rings, pins, and other small items with
tiny diamonds. But they are still usable for perhaps the favorite
test of most people, which is to scratch it against glass. Glass
will not scratch glass in the way a diamond will. Diamonds will
cut down into the surface, where using a glass "gemstone"
might leave a surface mark.
This is due to the hardness of diamonds. Hardness in gemstones
is sometimes thought of as how tough they are, but it's actually
a system devised by the German minerologist Freiderich Mols, to
rate how well gems stood up to the wear and tear of being set into
jewelry and used in everyday life.
His scale runs from 1 to 10, with 1 being the softest, and 10,
the hardest. Due to the very unique nature of how gems are made,
from a variety of minerals in sometimes disparate environmental
circumstances, a gemstone that is only one rating higher than another,
can actually be many times harder. But whatever the rating, that
gem will be capable of scratching others of its kind, and any stone
rated below it.
Diamonds, as a 10, cannot be scratched by any other gem.
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