As Kurt Vonnegut used to say, the entire fire safety industry is based on the fact that oxygen is a highly reactive gas and can combine violently with almost anything. That’s because it really, really wants electrons. When oxygen combines with carbon, we call it combustion. Or burning. But it is essentially oxygen slamming into a carbon compound and becoming part of it. If it happens to people, they can die, so the firemen are there to make sure oxygen doesn’t combine with people too violently.
Oxygen can also combine with other materials, too. When it combines with iron, we call it rust. And when it combines with zirconium, we call it cubic zirconia, and then we make cubic zironia rings out of it. Make sense? Cubic zirconia rings are essentially made out of a rock of zirconium rust.
Here are some interesting ways I just thought of to be able to tell the difference between a diamond ring and cubic zirconia rings. In terms of density, cubic zirconia rings beat out diamond, meaning, if you take a diamond and a cubic zironia ring and remove the cubic zirconia from its setting, you’ll have two stones. Diamond has a density of 3.5 grams/cm3. Cubic zirconia has a density of 5.5 grams/cm3.
Now, if you want to tell if your cubic zirconia ring is indeed a cubic zirconia ring and not the diamond ring that your cheap fiancé promised it was, you now have all the information you need. Here’s what you have to do.
First, take your cubic zirconia ring. Get one of those really thin graduated cylinders with accuracy to the tenth of a milliliter. Fill it up to, say, 5mL. Drop the stone in. Record exactly how much the water was displaced. That is your volume.
Now, take your cubic zirconia from your cubic zirconia ring and get a scale accurate to the hundredth of a gram. You can find these things at your local university campus in a chemistry lab. Take your stone and weigh it. That’s your weight.
Take the weight, and divide it by the volume. If the answer is around 5.5, you have a cubic zirconia ring and your fiancé was either duped or cheap. If the answer is closer to 3.5, you have a real diamond.
Yeah yeah, I know you really wanted a genuine cubic zirconia ring, but you’ll just have to settle for the real thing this time. Real, genuine cubic zirconia rings only come to those who wait. Or those who buy them accidentally. Or some other such thing.
