Cubic zirconium

Cubic zirconium is the synthetic diamond. The material-imitator has possess all diamond’s properties and the most important thing – rather cheap.

The addition of those or other impurities allows to create stones of unique colours not meeting in the nature (for example, “lavender”), or to achieve unusual optical effects, such as colour change at illumination change – ” alexandrite effect”. Even painted in colour of amethyst, cubic zirconium with its diamond game creates the image absolutely distinct from any natural stone.

Visually faceted fianits and brilliants, especially of small size and already inserted into jewellery, are the extremely difficult to distinguish from each other, but tool methods allow to diagnose them unmistakably. First of all, it concerns the lowered heat conductivity of a brilliant that is defined with a special tester and characteristic density (the cube of zirconium is heavier than the majority of other stones, including a brilliant). Besides, the edges of the faceted cubic zirconium are slightly rounded off, that also distinguishes it from a brilliant.

Color chart

The specification

Hardness from 7, 5 to 8, 5 on Moos scale

Density from 6, 5 to 10 g/sm3

Factor of refraction from 2, 15 to 2, 25

Crystal lattice – a cubic crystal lattice