Encore Diamond Ring

Diamond is pure carbon, its atoms locked in a cubic lattice, which makes it the hardest natural material there is: 10 on the Mohs scale. Diamonds form 150 to 200 kilometres down, in the earth's mantle, and are carried up by volcanic eruptions; most are between one and three and a half billion years old. Colour is graded from D, colourless, downwards, and E and F sit at the very top of the scale.

For some two thousand years nearly every diamond came from India, from river gravels in the south traded through Golconda. Brazil took over in the 1720s, and South Africa in the 1870s. Until the late nineteenth century every diamond was cut by hand and by eye, which is where the old mine cut comes from: a cushion shape with a high crown, a small table and a broad, soft flash, made before machines and modern proportions.

Today most diamonds come from Russia, Botswana, Canada, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, South Africa and Namibia, mined from the volcanic pipes that carried them up, or from the gravels those pipes have weathered into.

An antique diamond's origin is its age. Old mine cuts were made by hand from the eighteenth century until the late nineteenth, when the world's diamonds came from India, then Brazil and, from the 1870s, South Africa. The mine of any single stone was almost never recorded. What survives instead is the cut itself, made by eye before machines, and very often a life in older jewellery before this setting.

AusPost Express in Australia, DHL abroad, signed for and insured. Returns within the terms of the returns policy.

Take it off for the gym, the sea and the garden. Warm water, a drop of soap and a soft brush; dry with a soft cloth.