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We report on the use of synthetic single-crystal diamonds for high purity x-ray polarimetry to improve the polarization purity of present-day x-ray polarimeters. The polarimeter setup consists of a polarizer and an analyzer, each based on two parallel diamond crystals used at a Bragg angle close to 45 •. The experiment was performed using one (400) Bragg reflection on each diamond crystal and synchrotron undulator radiation at an x-ray energy of 9838.75 eV. A polarization purity of 8.9×10 −10 was measured at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), which is the best value reported for two-reflection polarizer/analyzer setups. This result is encouraging and a first step to improve the resolution of x-ray polarimeters further by using diamond crystal polarizers and analyzers with four or six consecutive reflections.