Synthetic diamonds rock the industry
By Margaret Webb Pressler
The Washington Post
A question has dogged the jewelry industry for decades: If man could make a perfect diamond in a laboratory — indistinguishable from one mined from the ground — what would it be worth?
This query has gone unanswered ever since the first synthetic diamond was manufactured in the 1950s. Beautiful stones have been created, but nothing that couldn't be identified as made-in-the-lab.
Until now.
Even as natural diamonds fly out of jewelry stores for Valentine's Day, two well-financed startup companies are rolling out manufactured diamonds that can be distinguished from natural ones only with extremely expensive equipment. The manufactured gems aren't easy or cheap to produce, but they're the kind of nearly flawless, sparkly stones that the jewelry industry — especially DeBeers SA, which controls about 60 percent of the rough-diamond market — has long feared.
"Everybody's worried because if you look at the price of rough diamonds since 1948, they have never declined in price," said Kenneth Gassman, a diamond industry analyst with Rapaport Research. "Why? Because DeBeers has done a great job of propping up the market. Now you come in here and suddenly you have synthetic stones that look like the real thing. Now what happens to prices?"
The answer could become clearer over the next year or two as these "cultured" diamonds become more widely available. The yellow diamonds being made by Gemesis Corp. of Sarasota, Fla., are now for sale in only a handful of jewelry stores nationwide. The nearly colorless, flawless white diamonds from Apollo Diamond Inc. of Boston should be available by fall.
Both companies insist that they aren't trying to replace mined diamonds. Rather, they expect to find a market niche alongside real diamonds, offering consumers more affordable alternatives.
"We think we'll have an additive niche in the market, and that people will add to their collection of jewelry," Apollo Diamond President Bryant Linares said.
The best-known synthetic gems are simulants — stones such as cubic zirconia or Moissanite that look like diamonds but are altogether different. They may be lovely in a piece of jewelry, but a jeweler or gemologist can tell the difference even if the public can't.
What Apollo and Gemesis are producing, on the other hand, are real diamonds using high-tech methods. "These are chemically, optically and physically identical to mined diamonds," Linares said.
Gemesis uses a high-heat, high-pressure system to convert a piece of refined graphite into a yellow diamond in about 80 hours. Apollo uses a chamber of carbon vapor that slowly attaches, atom by atom, to a thin wafer of diamond, gradually building up to a near-perfect stone..
What worries jewelers is how difficult it is to detect these stones.
Gemesis' diamonds, which can be identified by sophisticated labs run by groups such as the Gemological Institute of America, carry a laser inscription.
No one knows yet whether buyers will consider these stones just as good as those that come out of the ground. "I don't think it's going to affect the market one bit," said Lynne Loube, a gemologist in Bethesda, Md. But if someone wants to trade up to a larger stone by buying a manufactured diamond, "there's nothing wrong with that," she said.
