Friday, October 16, 2009

Synthetic diamonds still a rough cut


Synthetic diamonds

The day may come when the diamonds adorning red carpet celebrities come from a factory in Florida instead of a mine in Liberia, but do not expect a huge paradigm shift yet.

Synthetic diamond makers received a boost in January when the Gemological Institute of America - the organization that invented the color, cut, clarity and carat diamond standards 50 years ago - began grading the quality of lab-grown diamonds.


"It gives validity to what investors and manufacturers of gems have been saying for several years," says Stephen Lux, CEO of Diamond Gemesis in Sarasota, Fla. "The alternative to lab-grown diamonds are a reality, and these diamonds are a nice value compared to mined stones which are scarce. "

It takes Gemesis four days to grow a diamond of an average of 2.5 carats. The process begins by placing a microscopic diamond grains in a 4,000-pound machine about the size of a kitchen oven. Having hundreds of thousands of pounds of pressure and at temperatures as high as 2700 degrees Fahrenheit, the nugget grows, one atom at a time. It uses about 20 kilowatt-hours per carat, "says Reza Abbaschian, a materials scientist who helped the company develop its process.

The Gemesis process mimics a diamond development a few hundred miles the ground. Apollo Diamond, based near Boston, takes a different tack, imitating the way diamonds are produced in space. Through CVD, Apollo process pumps gas into a chamber that essentially count the carbon, forming a diamond nugget from a "seed" within two to four weeks.

For now comes the most cultured diamonds in colors, the natural corollary is rare in nature and pricey in stores. Gemesis specializes in yellow diamonds that get their color from a boost in nitrogen. Gemesis' Lux estimates the potential market for yellow diamonds alone to be in the tens of millions of dollars. He hopes to create more colorful and larger gems over the next five years.

Apollo Diamond produces colorless stones from quarter carat to a half carat in size. The company spent most of a decade refining a method that has already created the kind of thin diamond film that gives scalpel and industrial tools a rigid coating.

If you cultivate it, will they buy?
As far as aesthetics go, consumers should not see any difference. Both mined and synthetic diamonds are chemically identical. Neither the naked eye or an ordinary microscope can detect the difference. Dragonflies can tell with a loupe by reading a laser inscription required by the FTC. Otherwise, it takes high-tech equipment that analyzes the crystal structure of diamonds (like a proprietary machine De Beers has) to distinguish.

While some consumers may see an advantage to synthetic diamonds, however, is in the environmental and political arenas. Bryant Linares, CEO of diamond maker Apollo Diamond, predicts that lab-grown gems will fill a niche in the market for jewelry shoppers wary of the ecological damage of mining, and the costs in human lives imposed on the illegal trade in diamonds in Africa . Mining removes several hundred tons of earth to extract one carat worth of diamond. Amnesty International estimates that 3.7 million people have died in Africa in the smuggling of conflict diamonds to fund rebel armies.

And there is a cost benefit to consumers. After being polished, polished and set in jewelry, synthetic stones cost about 15 percent less than comparable diamonds.

Actually Gemesis experiencing rapid growth. It adds a new diamond pressure cooker to its collection of hundreds every few days. Diamond production has tripled since last summer, Lux plans to further expand its 10,000 square meter operation later this year.

Several brick-and-mortar jewelry stores, as well as online retailers, carry Gemesis gems. But not everyone has taken a shine to the lab-made gems. Tiffany and other elite jewelers reprimand synthetic diamond. And the jewelry industry continues to debate whether lab-grown diamonds deserve to be baptized "cultured pearls," like pearls.
Others say the ethical incentives are excessive. Only about 5 percent of people who saw the film Blood Diamond, which showed the ugly side of the mined diamond trade, said they would change their shopping habits to avoid the so-called conflict diamonds, according Jewelry Consumer Opinion Council.

And because the diamond industry has improved its practice to trace the source of each stone through the Kimberley Process, eschews diamonds for human rights reasons is short sighted, says Rob Bates, senior editor at jewelers Circular Keystone magazine.

"When you buy diamonds, you're helping communities in Africa," he said. "When you buy them made by a machine, you're helping 20 guys in Florida."
Bates and others believe that professional grown diamonds do not live up to their hype, and that it may take them a lifetime to represent a viable alternative to mined gems in jewelry.

"There is hardly anyone out there, and those who are out there, mostly fancy colored diamonds for high prices," he said. "We not only are not there yet, we are not even close to that."

Like Bates, claims other industry observers, the demand for man-made diamonds are probably greater than supply. "I would be surprised if there were more than 10,000 carats in single stone in existence," says Liz Chatelain, president of marketing firm that runs JCOC. "Ten years from now when the technology is in place and there is a market around it, it can make a difference enough to really infiltrate the market."

Lab-grown diamonds can fill a niche, especially for those customers seeking colored stones, but they will probably not replace diamonds in the most valuable jewels, "said Chatelain. "If there is something that took 3 billion years and something that took three weeks to do is get to the premium 3 billion."

It does not prevent the diamond makers from dreaming. For now only begin-ups as Gemesis and Apollo seems to produce them for jewelry, although De Beers' Element 6 Division has made diamonds for decades. Diamond-makers look forward to the anticipated increase in demand for diamonds from developing countries, particularly China and India. The relatively low cost of launching a synthetic diamond mine against billions of dollars it takes to cut a new mine from the ground could benefit companies like Gemesis and Apollo in the long run, experts say.

"Man-made diamonds will be with us in many ways, we can only begin to imagine right now that will materially affect everyone on earth," says Apollo's Linares.

For example, as microprocessors continue to become hotter, faster and less in line with Moore's Law, diamonds could replace heat-sensitive silicon. The thermal conductivity, stiffness and transparency of diamonds, also makes them attractive for next generation optics, digital data storage and in nanotek medical equipment. And much further into the future, Linares imagines that diamonds components themselves could clean up toxic waste and lead to ultra-efficient, compact solar panels.


Synthetic diamonds


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