A natural diamond is made from carbon and is the hardest natural known substance on earth. Natural diamonds are created over a period of one to three billion years, many kilometres below the earth’s mantle under natural conditions of very high pressure and high temperature. But unlike champagne, the use of the word diamond was never specifically claimed by those doing the difficult and costly job of mining them, which resulted in the producers of human-made synthetic lookalikes seizing upon the hallowed nomenclature.
