Trendsurfing: Synthetic diamonds (The Times)
By David Rowan
It's not just Leonardo DiCaprio and his film Blood Diamond that De Beers has to worry about. Over the next few months, the diamond cartel faces its biggest challenge in years: the roll-out to jewellers and consumer websites of a new generation of convincingly genuine stones grown entirely in a lab. As manufacturing technology races ahead, with more and more firms creating diamonds that are physically and chemically identical to the real thing, get set for a wave of buzz in 2007 as the "cultured" diamond becomes a mainstream and relatively affordable commodity. It's yet one more example of the trend for high-end luxury to become an everyday consumer aspiration.
The big push comes next month, when the Gemological Institute of America (GIA), one of the industry's leading authorities, plans to start grading laboratory-grown diamonds alongside those deposited underground thousands of years ago by nature. That should help standardise quality control for what the GIA's research director, James Shigley, says are "exact in terms of physical, chemical and optical properties" to naturally created stones. As Shigley explains it, "the only people who would be able to recognise that these diamonds weren't grown under ground are trained gemologists - and even they'd have to use a microscope".
What makes the established industry nervous - and has prompted fears that the market could crash - is the synthetic diamond's far lower price, typically 20 to 30 per cent of that for a mined stone. Then there are the ethical claims made for them. One of the new generation of manufacturers, Adia, markets its stones as having almost no impact on the environment, unlike those from open-cast mines, "which destroy ecosystems and the environment in the process". They are also claimed to be "better than the real thing - not because they're technically flawless, but because they don't support human-rights abuses in Africa". Cue the footage of Leo DiCaprio's character discovering the full brutality behind the trade in Sierra Leone's conflict diamonds.
De Beers, as you would expect, is fighting back. It has had time to prepare - after all, there have been industrial attempts to manufacture diamonds for more than 50 years. But what is new is the success of advanced technologies from companies such as Apollo Diamond and Gemesis that produce stones of a high enough quality to fool some of the experts. Gemesis applies high pressures to a tiny piece of real diamond in the presence of carbon so that it grows atom by atom; Apollo exposes shards of diamonds to hot gases over about a week. The company promises that the results - which can be five carats - will soon be sold over a direct-to-consumer website.
"They’ll have their place in costume jewellery, but they’re not the real McCoy," sniffs Susan Lamb of De Beers' Diamond Trading Company. "I can’t imagine why anyone would want one except for the novelty factor." Still, the establishment is taking no chances, and is fighting for synthetic gems to be prominently labelled as such. In Germany, for instance, a court has already ruled that Gemesis cannot call its stones "cultured diamonds". We can also presumably expect a run of De Beers-inspired Hollywood screenplays in which the baddies are humiliated when it transpires that they have given the girl a "fake" stone.
That does not seem to worry Apollo, which is gearing up its marketing under the slogan "Nature, Perfected". Let's see if David Beckham agrees when he has to decide where to spend the odd million quid on Victoria's Christmas present.
(The Times Magazine, December 16 2006)
It's not just Leonardo DiCaprio and his film Blood Diamond that De Beers has to worry about. Over the next few months, the diamond cartel faces its biggest challenge in years: the roll-out to jewellers and consumer websites of a new generation of convincingly genuine stones grown entirely in a lab. As manufacturing technology races ahead, with more and more firms creating diamonds that are physically and chemically identical to the real thing, get set for a wave of buzz in 2007 as the "cultured" diamond becomes a mainstream and relatively affordable commodity. It's yet one more example of the trend for high-end luxury to become an everyday consumer aspiration.
The big push comes next month, when the Gemological Institute of America (GIA), one of the industry's leading authorities, plans to start grading laboratory-grown diamonds alongside those deposited underground thousands of years ago by nature. That should help standardise quality control for what the GIA's research director, James Shigley, says are "exact in terms of physical, chemical and optical properties" to naturally created stones. As Shigley explains it, "the only people who would be able to recognise that these diamonds weren't grown under ground are trained gemologists - and even they'd have to use a microscope".
What makes the established industry nervous - and has prompted fears that the market could crash - is the synthetic diamond's far lower price, typically 20 to 30 per cent of that for a mined stone. Then there are the ethical claims made for them. One of the new generation of manufacturers, Adia, markets its stones as having almost no impact on the environment, unlike those from open-cast mines, "which destroy ecosystems and the environment in the process". They are also claimed to be "better than the real thing - not because they're technically flawless, but because they don't support human-rights abuses in Africa". Cue the footage of Leo DiCaprio's character discovering the full brutality behind the trade in Sierra Leone's conflict diamonds.
De Beers, as you would expect, is fighting back. It has had time to prepare - after all, there have been industrial attempts to manufacture diamonds for more than 50 years. But what is new is the success of advanced technologies from companies such as Apollo Diamond and Gemesis that produce stones of a high enough quality to fool some of the experts. Gemesis applies high pressures to a tiny piece of real diamond in the presence of carbon so that it grows atom by atom; Apollo exposes shards of diamonds to hot gases over about a week. The company promises that the results - which can be five carats - will soon be sold over a direct-to-consumer website.
"They’ll have their place in costume jewellery, but they’re not the real McCoy," sniffs Susan Lamb of De Beers' Diamond Trading Company. "I can’t imagine why anyone would want one except for the novelty factor." Still, the establishment is taking no chances, and is fighting for synthetic gems to be prominently labelled as such. In Germany, for instance, a court has already ruled that Gemesis cannot call its stones "cultured diamonds". We can also presumably expect a run of De Beers-inspired Hollywood screenplays in which the baddies are humiliated when it transpires that they have given the girl a "fake" stone.
That does not seem to worry Apollo, which is gearing up its marketing under the slogan "Nature, Perfected". Let's see if David Beckham agrees when he has to decide where to spend the odd million quid on Victoria's Christmas present.
(The Times Magazine, December 16 2006)
posted by David Rowan at Saturday, December 16, 2006
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