Diamonds aren't always colorless; they can also be blue, yellow, green and even pink. But what makes these jewels come in varied hues?
At their base, diamonds are made of a single element: carbon. "It's just pure carbon," forged into treasure under very high pressures, said Luc Doucet, a senior research fellow of geology at Curtin University in Australia. They typically form deep beneath Earth's surface, more than 100 miles (161 kilometers) down in the planet’s mantle. Here, the pressure and temperature are extreme enough for the carbon atoms to bind together in a tight lattice.
