Archive for April, 2007

The Tiffany diamond is a yellow diamond owned by the Tiffany Jewerly company. It is almost twice the size of the famous hope diamond. “Light flashes across the 82 facets of the Tiffany Diamond, highlighting the brilliance of the giant gem at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

One of the world’s largest yellow diamonds, the stone is on loan from Tiffany & Co., from Wednesday through Sept. 23. It joins such famed jewels as the Hope Diamond, Hooker Emerald and Oppenheimer Diamond.

The Tiffany Diamond weighs 128.54 carats and is in a cushion cut. Perched on it is a gem-encrusted bird known as the “Bird on a Rock,” designed in the early 1960’s by Jean Schlumberger. The bird is gold and platinum with white and yellow diamonds accented by a ruby eye….”

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Diamonds are immensely old, formed long before dinosaurs roamed the earth. The youngest diamond is 900 million years old, and the oldest is 3.2 billion years old.
The word ‘diamond’ comes from the Greek term adamas meaning unconquerable.

Every diamond is unique; no two are alike.

Diamonds exist in many colors, the rarest of all being red. The most common is yellow.

Diamonds exist in many colors, the rarest of all being red.
Each stone loses, on average, more than half its original weight during cutting and polishing.

Diamonds were first mined in India more than 2800 years ago.

Until 1896 the only country which mined diamonds was India.

Less than 5% of all the diamonds made into jewelry are larger than one carat.