Question: Why did you do that to your ring?

Rowena Fletcher-Wood answered on 8 Mar 2014:

X-rays don’t damage the ring in any way. They reflect off it and interact with it like light – x-rays are simply from a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum. There was more risk of the machine heating up and melting if the x-rays hit the metal on the ring than the ring getting damaged (for this to happen we would have had to line it up wrong).

When my fiance gave me my ring, a diamond (well, three little ones) seemed like such a huge gesture and so big a valuation that I was overwhelmed by it: it seemed so important and I didn’t know how to deal with those feelings. Taking an x-ray of the centre diamond turned the ring into something I could understand and be fascinated with in a new way: science. It reminded me that the feelings we have about diamonds are built in by society, and that it is actually a crystal just like the many valueless ones I work with every day.

The other reason that I wanted to x-ray my ring is because I wanted it to feel special and unique. Every stone is unique, but there will be lots and lots of copies of my ring out in the world (H Samuels will not have made and sold just one). The x-ray pattern is like a fingerprint of a crystal structure. It shows you what material it is (aha! genuine diamond!) and it also shows up the unique set of defects so small you can’t see them unless you have a trained jeweller’s eye. This shows up on the diffraction pattern as blurs and extra/missing spots. I find that thinking of my ring as not perfect makes it more special: it makes it more real and it makes it individual, physically individual as well as packed with individual memories.