#and i promply go HELL YEAH ITS SO COOLA

[lepetitfruit]

Oooh, an opportunity to talk about obscure stuff from work? HELL YEAH.

Diamonds and diamond stimulants are really interesting, so much so that my entire post-secondary education is on gemstones and their uses. Fair warning, this post will include some(extremely fair) judgment about people's choice of diamond simulant, because some are OBJECTIVELY better than others. Anyway, I digress.

This got suuuuper long, so explanation is below the cut.

When talking about diamond simulants, you have a BUNCH of options. This includes glass, plastic, white sapphires, cubic zirconia, and moissanite. I'll also be talking about lab grown diamonds here, because while they aren't diamond simulants, they kinda fall into the realm of 'things people use to replace natural diamonds'. There's going to be a fair amount of technical explanation here, so be warned.

Starting off with the worst options: glass and plastic. Glass and plastic are being lumped together because they have pretty similar uses and problems. Glass and plastic diamond replacements are used almost exclusively in incredibly cheap costume jewelry. Both are soft, scratch and chip easily, and look nothing like real diamonds. The "look nothing like real diamonds" thing is for a few reasons, though mostly because of surface texture and refractive index.

Surface texture refers to how the surface of the stone looks(crazy, right?). This uncludes stuff like polish lines and the crispness of the facets(facets are the flat areas on a cut gemstone. I'm never sure how much about this sort of stuff people actually know, so I'll probably explain some obvious stuff. Bear with me). Because plastic is so soft, the facets tend to have very rounded edges and are less distinct. Diamonds have perfectly flat facets, and sharp divides between them. Polish lines on plastic "stones" are very rounded, as opposed to being sharp on a real diamond. The surface texture of glass is more similar to diamonds, with facets being flat. However, glass isn't very durable and so tends to have small chips along the edges of facets.

White sapphires have become a more common simulant recently, though still not nearly as popular as cubics or moissanite. This is in part because lab grown white sapphires are relatively inexpensive (depending on size of course, but about a nice evening out for 2) and extremely hard. Diamonds are of course the hardest material available, and are a 10 on the moh's scale. Sapphires are a 9, glass is a 5.5, and plastic varies, but is lowwwww. White sapphires are a generally pretty good simulant in terms of wearability and surface texture, but don't replicate the diamond look very well for 2 reasons- refractive index, and fire.

Refractive index does matter for glass and plastic, but because the surface texture makes it immediately obvious they're not real diamonds im not going to talk about it. I'll explain more on RI later.

Refractive index is a number that represents how much a ray of light will bend when going from medium to another. In this case, that is air to sapphire(or whatever other material we're discussing). Refractive index also determines what angle a ray has to hit a surface in order for for to reflect, rather than refract. I warned you there would be science. Diamond's refractive index is 2.42, while sapphire's is ~1.76. The higher the refractive index, the more light bends when it enters the medium. Also, the higher the refractive index, the steeper the angle needed to enter the medium. Okay, I promise it gets interesting again here. Because sapphire's refractive index is so much lower than diamond's, it has to be cut differently to achieve the same result. The angle needed to make the light reflect, rather than refract, is much narrower for sapphire than for diamond. This means the stones must be cut deeper to keep the same amount of brilliance, and even then sapphires are much darker. I have a diagram, because refractive index and stone cuts are reaaaallll confusing. This one is specifically about diamonds, but it illustrates the point well.

stop shaming people for being passionate about the things that they love. stop mocking people for having unusual interests. like, honestly, i'm so tired of feeling embarrassed for being "too much". if being too much means having deep interests that fill my life with romanticism and excitement, then let me be!!! i'd much rather listen to anyone ranting about their latest obsession with 16th century swords than have a boring ordinary conversation with those who shame passionate people