REPORT
Diamonds:
still forever?
With technological advancements
allowing companies to create
diamonds identical to their mined
counterparts – Edgar considers
if the allure of the precious
stone will be lost
BY Josh Sims
H
ere is a
recipe: take a seed,
the tiniest
slither of carbon
material and
put it into a chamber.
Add
varying
amounts
of
gases,
including a carbon
source, into the chamber.
Heat to a very high temperature
to produce a plasma, in which
the gases break down and carbon molecules attach themselves
to the seed, causing it to grow. Let your CVD, or Chemical Vapour
Deposition, simmer for anywhere between a few days and a few
weeks. Remove gases. Remove the now larger seed from the
chamber and crack it open. Congratulations, you have now done
what it takes nature billions of years to do: you have made a diamond.
The theory has been understood for over a century: one Henri
Moissan previously attempted to make diamonds back in the 1890s.
But in recent years it has become a reality, and earlier this year
just such elemental cookery was used to produce the first virtually
flawless, white, carat-sized stone. “And that makes it a milestone,”
says Clive Hill, the CEO of its maker, Washington Diamonds. “A lot
of people in the diamond industry have been keen to view such
lab-grown diamonds as marginal. But this stone is unknockable and
unignorable. Quality lab-grown diamonds have arrived.”
Such is the cachet derived from the rarity of diamond – the product
of long searches for sites of potential, followed by intensive mining
to find maybe very little – not to mention its mystique of being the
hardest and one of the most thermally conductive substances known
to man – that the idea of being able to grow one seems the stuff of
science fiction, or a Hollywood thriller. Certainly, the story of how the
idea had its modern revival reads like it too: a retired American army
officer visits Moscow to buy a new electronic security device, but
while he is there a scientist, Dr. Boris Feigelson, takes him aside to
show him the blueprints for something else, something developed for
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the Soviet space programme: a tumble-dryer-sized device that, yes,
makes diamonds. General Carter Clarke cannot believe his eyes,
immediately buys three, ships them back to America and founds
Gemesis Cultured Diamonds, making it a market pioneer.
The problem of the initial process was that, as a consequence
of the nitrogen content of the gases used, it could only produce
coloured diamonds – canary yellows, sometimes lavenders and
pinks. If that could be called a problem – after all, in nature coloured
diamonds are even rarer than the white
variety. But now that has been overcome.
Last year Gemesis also broke some ground
by producing the largest, whitest, labcreated emerald-cut diamond to date – at
1.29 ct, E colour and VVS2 clarity, for those
who like their gemstone specs. In more
layman’s terms, and in the alchemist’s
dream, this is precisely the kind of diamond
that is extremely hard to find in nature.
Indeed, every lab-made diamond has one
characteristic lauded in mined diamonds: each is flawless. And, what
is more, each is around 25% the cost of its mined equivalent.
Add in that lab-made diamonds have none of the environmental
impact of mined diamonds, nor are associated with devastating
African wars, and, unsurprisingly, those few companies that make
their money from mined diamonds have been less than supportive
of the idea. They often, for example, inaccurately refer to lab-made
diamonds as ‘synthetic’ diamonds, despite the fact that they are not
cubic zircona or glass, but chemically identical to diamonds out of
the ground, as court cases have had to underline.
“Their worry is purely commercial,” notes Hill, even if for the
time-being their business is healthy, with mine output declining
while demand, especially from the Far East, is decidedly up. It is
a worry that might well worsen. The bigger the diamond, the more
complex the technical difficulties and the harder it is to grow, yet Hill
says Washington Diamonds is “a few months away” from creating
the first 2 ct stones. “That’s a good size,” Hill adds, with some
understatement. “There are not many people with a 2 ct diamond
on their finger.”
So is that it for the almost supernatural
aura with which we have imbued a
substance which, bar a small twist of
chemistry – carbon atoms connecting in
super-strong, ultra-hard 3D bonds rather
than in layers – is little different from the
soft graphite in your pencil? Neil Duttson,
of London-based independent ethical
diamond dealers Duttson Rocks, is not
so sure. He argues there will always be
a demand for natural diamonds – indeed, some clients are banking
on it, buying them up as long-term investment vehicles. “Despite
some fear in the industry that lab-made diamonds will somehow
take over, they are just different – a different product for a different
customer,” says Duttson. “All that’s really important is that lab-made
is not passed off as natural, but there are already machines to tell
the one from the other.”
In the longer term, there is likely to be increased acceptance
of the lab-made variety: there was a similar resistance to cultured
pearls when they were first created, and now they, not deep-dive
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IMAGES: Corbis
Each lab-made
diamond is flawless
and can sell for
around 25 per cent
of the cost
pearls, account for the vast majority of all pearls
sold. But in the short term, the diamond market will
divide: between those shoppers for whom increasingly
influential green-thinking or price is a leading consideration,
for which lab-grown diamonds might be said to have a
democratising effect, and those for whom the emotional content
of a mined diamond – the fact that it has been created by aweinspiring natural forces over countless eons – remains important. It is,
perhaps, akin to the commonly-made distinction between a factorymade and a hand-made product. “A real man buys a real diamond”,
as one rather misleading ad campaign has put it.
Protecting some of the fragile magic that society has imbued
diamonds with – from Marilyn Monroe singing about a “girl’s best
friend”, to Superman forging them with his bare hands, to rap culture
and bling – will be important for the lab-made variety too, in order to
keep prices up to sufficient levels to cover the costs of what remains
an expensive manufacturing process. One fear, as Tom Chatham
suggests, is that there is also the potential for the new lab-grown
diamond sector to implode – with makers after a quick buck rushing out
large quantities of low quality lab-made diamonds rather than, as the
mined diamond sector and DeBeers in particular has so successfully
done, delicately managing both supply and public image alike.
Chatham might well know. It was his father, Carroll, who in 1934
developed one of the first processes for creating lab-made emeralds,
some decades before making diamonds became feasible. Such
coloured gems are rarer in nature than diamonds (“for sheer rarity
factor, we’ve put the wrong gem on the pedestal,” he says) although
in lower demand relative to diamonds – thanks to propaganda
building their association with expressions of romantic love and the
tradition of using them in engagement rings. But that didn’t stop
Russian makers over-producing lab-made emeralds soon after the
break-up of the Soviet Union, much as before them Chinese makers
uncovered the technique devised by Mikimoto in Japan to make
cultured pearls and short-sightedly did the same.
Small wonder then that, to return to our Hollywood thriller, diamond
manufacturers are highly secretive about the
details of their particular processes. “The various
manufacturers don’t share information,” explains
Chatham. “There have been various leaks from other
companies that have helped – people like to brag about
how it’s done, or they give tours of their facilities, which I
wouldn’t do. But really a lot of kitchen secrets go into making
quality lab-made diamonds. It’s not just about buying a diamondmaking machine and switching it on. There’s a lot of physics,
chemistry and special touches that make it work.”
The real upshot of that work may not be clear for decades. By
some accounts, mined diamonds are set to become ever more
rare – as no major new sites for exploration have been uncovered
and the expense of removing the diamonds from the ground
becomes prohibitive.
“The whole market is touchy about lab-made diamonds now,
even some of our oldest customers, who are OK with buying our
emeralds, rubies and sapphires, don’t want the diamonds,” says
Chatham. “They don’t buy lab-made ones because they don’t have
to – yet. They can’t sell a good natural emerald anyway, because
it’s already way too expensive. That’s not the case with diamonds.
And there is supply. For the moment. But [unless some yet-to-bedevised technology makes the finding of and access to undiscovered
diamond pipes feasible] we could be out of mined diamonds within 40
years. The supply isn’t endless. The problem for lab-made diamonds
at the moment is that the industry can’t produce enough stones at the
right price to take full advantage of the growing awareness of them.
But we’re on the verge of cracking that.”
Furthermore, the debate as to how lab-made diamonds may or
may not revolutionise the jewellery industry may be missing the point.
What may prove of far greater significance could be the application of
diamonds in technology. According to Chatham, some seven billion
carats of softer, lower grade diamonds are already made each year
for industrial purposes, their special properties making them ideal
for cutting in particular. But, upgraded to the quality now feasible,
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diamonds could also be used more readily in semi-conductors,
optical devices, water purification systems, high-powered lasers
and other electronics of tomorrow. Never mind the radical change
to the world wrought by the silicon chip. The so-called diamond chip
could be key to making quantum computing a reality, with machines
operating at speeds exponentially faster than current hardware.
“In fact, one reason I got into this business was
that I have a touch of geek about me,” says
Washington Diamonds’ Clive Hill, who also
works in wind power generation. “And
the potential for lab-made diamonds
in applications are extremely exciting
– it gives me goose bumps. They could
really change the world. I’d say that within
a decade diamond products will be part of
many of the technologies we use everyday.”
Such a timeline may prove ambitious. Mike
McMahon is CEO of lab-made diamond maker Scio
Diamond Technology Corporation, which, since launching
two years ago, has run at capacity without yet having had
to pitch for orders. It uses a process that super-heats the seed
under low pressure, introduces methane and hydrogen and then
bombards the mix with microwaves to create a plasma that releases
carbon atoms, which one by one coalesce to build the diamond. He
says the trick will be less about understanding the science, nor even
about making diamonds of sufficient quality or even size or shape –
Scio has already devised ways of combining diamonds to create a 29
ct piece, albeit one that was two years in the making. It will be doing so
at sufficient speed and in sufficient quantities to fit the hard economics
of Big Tech’s business plan.
“There has been a tremendous amount of R&D over the last 50
years into what is needed to take various technologies forward and
the realisation is that diamond is the material that will take it there,”
says McMahon. “The knowledge is there but nobody has yet figured
out a way of supplying, say, Intel with enough diamonds to make the
creation of a diamond chip viable. They would want thousands, not one
or two. Lab-made diamond manufacturers have gone through tens of
millions of dollars understanding the science of what they do, but not
how to make a business out of it. But we’re at an embryonic stage. In
50 years it could all be very different.”
By then, of course, when diamonds of sufficient
quality, clarity and hardness can be massproduced, the implications for the jewellery
market will as likely be as profound
as that for technology. Quite what
standing the diamond will have as a
gesture, status item or cultural icon then
nobody yet knows. Certainly it is revealing that,
for all that the mined diamond industry considers
it useful now to portray lab-made diamonds as
second-class, one of the players in this field, Element
6, presently a maker of diamonds for industrial use, is part
of the DeBeers Group. “For now you have a tricky marketing
situation if your heritage is attached to natural diamonds,” as
Chatham notes. “But I think they’re just waiting, so the next decade
is going to be very interesting.”
Perhaps the worst case scenario – at least for jewellers – would be
a situation in which quality, cheap and plentiful lab-made diamonds
transform the very way we live, while costing mined diamonds
their carefully-constructed allure altogether. “Lab-grown diamond
is a destructive technology for many aspects of the industry,” as
McMahon puts it, with the suggestion that this may not be any great
shame. “Look, DeBeers and others in the mined diamond industry
have done a wonderful job of making a rock out of the ground worth
millions. It’s certainly cost me dearly in terms of presents for my wife
and daughter. But, you know, to me it’s still just a frickin’ rock.”
The greatest
impact of Labmade diamonds
Could come in
the field of
technology
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