This, possibly the cheapest of all elements, turns out to be among the most beautiful when highly polished. Industrially supplied carbon (purified coal basically) is a relatively porous and low density material that is used in the production of high grades of steel. Even at the highest purity of 99.99% the stuff is only a couple bucks per kilogram. Optionally, after applying a lot of different steps to compact, shape, cut and polish it you get to the pricier yet still pretty cheap cubes we offer.

Applying further polishing, unfortunately, does not yield a mirror cube. It simply leaves the dull dark gray cubes feeling smoother to the touch. In our quest to flesh out a mirror variant of each of our normally polished cubes we eventually overcame this problem by reformulating the starting material into a denser version with fewer pores and switching to a manual polishing stage rather than let the machine do it. Although the extra steps and manual labor ended up adding to the base price the jump was suprisingly modest. The premium look alone is worth the extra cost!