Diamonds Trivia
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39 free Diamonds trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Diamonds are carbon that took a few billion years and a violent volcanic lift to reach a jeweller's window, and almost everything about them — the price, the ring, the slogan — was shaped by people as much as by geology. The 39 questions cover how the stone forms and is graded, the celebrated gems and the monarchs, tycoons and film stars who owned them, the mines and the company that ran the trade for a century, conflict stones and the certification meant to stop them, lab-grown rivals and fakes, and diamonds in song, film and advertising. It suits a pub quiz round, a jewellery-trade icebreaker or anyone who has ever wondered what the four Cs actually measure. Play on your phone with instant answers and a one-line explanation for each, or print it for the table.
30 of 39 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01While a decoy sailed under guard by steamer, how did the 3,106-carat Cullinan rough reach London in 1905?
By registered post
By registered post, in a plain box: the parcel locked in the steamer captain's safe and watched by detectives for the whole voyage held a fake, there only to draw off thieves.
Q 02Harry Winston sent the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian in 1958 wrapped in plain brown paper; how much was the postage?
$2.44
$2.44 was the postage; the rest of the $145.29 bill was insurance for $1,000,000, and the brown-paper package itself is now kept in the Smithsonian's collection.
Q 03Which French queen's name was wrecked by the 1785 Affair of the Diamond Necklace, a con she never took part in?
Marie Antoinette
Marie Antoinette had turned the necklace down; the adventuress Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy forged her signature to get it from the Crown jewellers, and the queen's gossip-battered reputation never recovered.
Q 04Which 1985 Madonna video restages Marilyn Monroe's pink-gown number from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, suitors and all?
Material Girl
Material Girl restages 'Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend' but undercuts the lyric: in the video's story the star shrugs off rich admirers and falls for a director who poses as penniless.
Q 05Blood Diamond (2006), with DiCaprio as a Rhodesian smuggler, is set in which country's 1999 civil war?
Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone's rebels really did pay for their war with gems dug by forced labour, and the outcry led in 2003 to a global scheme certifying rough diamonds as conflict-free.
Q 06Which US state's Crater of Diamonds park lets visitors keep any gem they find, on the field that yielded the Uncle Sam?
Arkansas
Arkansas farmer John Huddleston found the first two diamonds there in 1906; mining companies kept failing on the site, and the state bought it in 1972 as a dig-it-yourself park.
Q 07On Friedrich Mohs's scratch-hardness scale, diamond takes the top value, which is what number?
10
10 is only a rank, not a measure: the step from corundum at 9 to diamond is by far the biggest on the scale, about a fourfold jump in absolute hardness.
Q 08The carat used to weigh diamonds is named after the seed of which tree, long used by gem traders as a weight?
Carob
Carob seeds were trusted because their mass was believed to vary little, and the word reached English via Italian carato, Arabic qīrāṭ and Greek kerátion.
Q 09Who founded De Beers Consolidated Mines in 1888, bankrolled by Alfred Beit and the Rothschild bank?
Cecil Rhodes
Cecil Rhodes won a furious share-buying battle against his great rival Barney Barnato, who then agreed to fold his own mines into the new company.
Q 10Which fictional spy's 1956 adventure took its title from the De Beers advertising slogan 'A Diamond Is Forever'?
James Bond
James Bond's fourth novel got its name after Ian Fleming spotted the line in an American magazine advert; copywriter Frances Gerety had written it for De Beers in 1947.
Q 11Where did a De Beers campaign launched in 1967 lift diamond engagement rings from under 5% of brides to 60% by 1981?
Japan
Japan had not even allowed diamond imports until 1959; by the 1980s De Beers adverts there asked for three months' salary, against two in America.
Q 12Grace Kelly wore her real Cartier engagement ring from Prince Rainier on screen in which 1956 film, her last?
High Society
High Society needed an engagement ring for its heroine, so Kelly simply wore her own; Rainier is said to have proposed with a ruby-and-diamond band before buying the big Cartier stone.
Q 13Who bought Elizabeth Taylor a 69-carat pear-shaped diamond in 1969, a day after Cartier outbid him for it at auction?
Richard Burton
Q 21Which French chemist burned a diamond with sunlight through a lens in 1772 and found it gave off carbon dioxide?
Antoine Lavoisier
Antoine Lavoisier saw the likeness to burning charcoal but drew no conclusion; in 1797 Smithson Tennant showed a diamond yields as much of the gas as the same weight of charcoal, so the gem is pure carbon.
Q 22Which gem lab devised the 'four Cs' of cut, clarity, colour and carat weight as a diamond grading standard?
GIA
GIA, the Gemological Institute of America founded in 1931, also introduced the D-to-Z colour scale, which starts at D to break from the older A, AA and AAA labels.
Q 23In 2012 roughly 84% of the world's rough diamonds passed through which European city's 'Square Mile' beside its Central Station?
Antwerp
Richard Burton paid Cartier $1.1m for the stone it had won for $1,050,000, then a record for a publicly sold jewel, and crowds queued in New York and Chicago to see it.
Q 14Who first sang 'Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend' on Broadway in 1949, four years before Marilyn Monroe filmed it?
Carol Channing
Carol Channing became a star as the gold-digging Lorelei Lee, but when Hollywood filmed the show without her the role came to be identified with Marilyn Monroe instead.
Q 15Which Australian singer-songwriter wrote the lyrics to Rihanna's 2012 hit 'Diamonds' in a reported 14 minutes?
Sia Furler
Sia Furler recorded a guide vocal that Rihanna followed so exactly that, when a producer played Sia the finished track, she thought the voice on it was still her own.
Q 16The Koh-i-Noor was recut on Prince Albert's orders after its dull cut disappointed crowds at which 1851 London event?
The Great Exhibition
The Great Exhibition crowds found it so dull that Punch dubbed it the 'Mountain of Darkness'; the recut of 1852 made it sparkle but cost it more than 40% of its weight.
Q 17Hong Kong tycoon Joseph Lau paid a record $48.4m in 2015 for the 12-carat 'Blue Moon' and renamed it after whom?
His daughter
His daughter Josephine, then seven, also lent her name to a 16-carat pink diamond Lau had bought the day before for $28.5m, duly renamed the Sweet Josephine.
Q 18Queen Elizabeth II revealed in 1958 that her family called the Cullinan III and IV brooch by what nickname?
Granny's Chips
Granny's Chips came out on a 1958 visit to the Amsterdam firm that had cut the stone, where the Queen unpinned the brooch and handed it to the elderly Louis Asscher to examine.
Q 19The Star of South Africa, swapped by a shepherd for 500 sheep, set off the diamond rush that built which city?
Kimberley
Kimberley grew out of the 1871 'New Rush' camp the find inspired; the shepherd's full price was 500 sheep, 10 oxen and a horse, and the buyer resold the stone for £11,200.
Q 20Diamond conducts heat about five times better than which metal, the most thermally conductive of all the metals?
Silver
Silver, the best of the metals at carrying heat, still trails diamond fivefold, which is why a jeweller's thermal probe can tell a real stone from most imitations in seconds.
Antwerp's district was also the scene of the 2003 'heist of the century', when thieves cracked a vault beneath it and took at least $100 million in diamonds, gold and jewellery, most of it never recovered.
Q 24Surat, a city that cuts and polishes about nine in every ten of the world's diamonds, is in which country?
India
India won the work on cost: labour-intensive cutting and polishing drifted away from Europe's old diamond centres to its lower-wage workshops.
Q 25The Argyle mine, which closed in 2020 after supplying over 90% of the world's pink diamonds, was in which country?
Australia
Australia's Argyle pit mostly yielded brown stones once fit only for industry, so its owner spent years rebranding them as 'champagne' and 'cognac' diamonds.
Q 26Which country's Karowe mine produced both the 1,109-carat Lesedi La Rona in 2015 and a 2,492-carat stone in 2024?
Botswana
Botswana's Karowe pit, run by Canada's Lucara, found a trio of 300-carat-plus stones in a single week of November 2015; Graff later cut the biggest into a 302-carat emerald cut and 66 smaller gems.
Q 27Ekati, Canada's first diamond mine, opened near Lac de Gras, 200 km south of the Arctic Circle, in which region?
Northwest Territories
The Northwest Territories find capped almost ten years of prospecting by geologists Chuck Fipke and Stewart Blusson, and set off one of the largest staking rushes in mining history.
Q 28Lady Gaga wore which jeweller's 128-carat yellow diamond to the 2019 Oscars, only the third person ever to put it on?
Tiffany & Co.
Tiffany & Co. had let only Mary Whitehouse at a 1957 ball and Audrey Hepburn, in 1961 publicity shots for Breakfast at Tiffany's, wear it before; Beyoncé became the fourth in a 2021 campaign.
Q 29A gang ram-raided which London attraction in 2000 for a 203-carat De Beers gem, unaware police had planted replicas?
The Millennium Dome
The Millennium Dome gang smashed in on a digger and meant to flee by speedboat down the Thames, but armed police were waiting behind a false wall and dressed as cleaners.
Q 30Which company's Tracy Hall made the first commercially viable synthetic diamonds in 1954 with a 'belt press'?
General Electric
General Electric made a fortune from the process and rewarded Hall with a $10 savings bond; disheartened, he left within a year for Brigham Young University.