Man Made Diamonds Vs Mined Diamonds

February 15th, 2012 |

Author: admin

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For over a century, DeBeers has held a virtual monopoly over the diamond industry by iron-handedly controlling the supply of diamonds. Today, the company still controls over 60% of the trade. Their beauty aside, the value of natural diamonds has always been dependent on the fact that they are rare and expensive to mine.

So it is not surprising that the recent developments in synthetic diamond manufacturing have the diamond industry giants worried. If diamonds are no longer rare and expensive to get, why would people pay thousands for them? In an attempt to combat the threat of synthetic diamonds, DeBeers has provided major jewelers with sophisticated, diamond authentication machines: DiamondSure and DiamondView.

The problem with making quality comparisons between man-made diamonds and mined diamonds is that there aren’t any huge, physical, optical or chemical differences.

And the ones that are there don’t necessarily favor the natural diamond.

Lab-grown diamonds tended to be smaller when the technology was just being developed. But the ability to make larger diamonds is improving. Apollo Diamonds, one of the first two companies (the other being Gemesis) that was among the first to start producing gem-quality diamonds uses a technique called chemical vapor deposition (CVD), which can produce multi-carat diamonds easily, for either gem or industrial use.

Another difference is that clear white diamonds are more common in nature, and colored diamonds are rare. In the lab, however, it is easier to produce colored diamonds than white diamonds.

Man-made diamonds also might have distinct growth patterns that professional jewelers using sophisticated equipment might be able to detect.

The other difference between mined and lab-grown diamonds is that lab-grown gems have fewer inclusions than natural diamonds. Inclusions are regarded as flaws, and the lack of them results in a higher clarity grading, so this is actually a point in favor of man-made gems.

The CVD method used by Apollo doesn’t use metal solvents in the creation process, thus their diamonds are as near to 100 percent pure diamond as you can get. One of the only ways to detect the fact that they are not natural mined diamonds is that they are too flawless. The price per carat of producing a CVD diamond is $ 5.

The goal of lab diamond manufacturers, however, is not to pass their stones off as natural diamonds, but rather to openly offer them as alternatives to natural diamonds.

As for the DeBeers and the diamond mining industry, they’re banking on the marketing angle to fight off the intrusion of lab-made diamonds. In a 2003 magazine article, Jef Van Royen, senior scientist at the Diamond High Council in Antwerp, was quoted as saying, “If people really love each other, then they give each other the real stone. It is not a symbol of eternal love if it is something that was created last week.”