It's hard to focus on writing up a description of indium without homing in on its one immediately obvious characteristic: its softness. While various web sources on elements claim for a number of metals that they're so soft that they "can be cut with a knife" indium is actually the only air-stable metal that actually can be cut with a knife. However, you'd still need a really sharp, big knife and strong muscle to do so if you wanted to slice through anything thicker than a finger-sized bar of it. Tin snips would be a better tool for this purpose.

This is the problem with this rare metal. It isn't, to be sure, quite as soft as play-doh - it's not like you can knead it with your fingers - but it's not that far off either. It's a neat trick to buy a rebar-sized rod and easily bend it as though you were the Hulk but it's a double-edged sword. If you were to pick up these cubes with anything harder than fleshy fingertips, like a tool for example, you'd instantly feel the metal giving way.

Which brings up another problem. Making these cubes is a labor of love, or a nightmare, depending on your point of view. It's trivially easy to get one of its six sides right - perfectly flat and polished even - but how do you support it so that you can work on the other sides without messing up the one you just got done? The answer is disappointingly low-tech: you simply have to be very very careful. Not to mention patient. The cubes are sliced through roughly and from that point forward treated as gingerly as possible. Our supplier spent many hours perfecting the technique to arrive at those desirable, perfect 90-degree corners but each one still takes a long time to make. The work that goes into making them, rather than the commodity price of the raw material, is what makes these so costly.

Ships in cotton-lined foam for protection. Please note that you will need to use extreme care in handling if you want to preserve their delicate shape. Even a minor bump into a hard surface will deform it at the point of impact. The edges and corners are so fragile that if you look at them wrong they will instantly smoosh in! 

10mm cube weighs 7.45g±0.05g and the 25.4mm tips the scales at 185g±2g