Seems sort of disloyal to say so, but the tiny ring on show at the American Physical Society looks wonderful! A mere 300 nanometres thick — a twentieth of the thickness of human hair — and five microns across, it is not going to go on anyone’s finger. So why the fascination? The diamond on it is synthetic. This beauty is a part for quantum computing.
Not that it would be easy to detect whether the diamond was real. There is increasing disquiet among diamond miners about the growth of the synthetic market. While manufacturing techniques are improving all the time, the costs are falling. Yet for real diamonds, especially the bigger ones, prices are rising. Reports from the recent major Tel Aviv diamond conference were of worries about shortages. For jewellers facing soaring gold, silver and platinum costs, synthetics offer at least one way out of the cost squeeze.
Indian customers, major jewellery buyers, will certainly be offered more. For some reason the Indian finance ministry has just cut customs duties on rough, cut and polished zirconia — one kind of synthetic diamonds.
Synthetics could rank pari-passu
Synthetic diamonds are even certified these days. The Gemological Institute of America, the foremost authority in gemology, has been offering the service since last year. That means the customer can make an informed choice. Horror of horrors, there is even talk that at this rate, synthetics of high quality could rank pari-passu!
So, do you go for a real 0.5ct $5,000 diamond engagement ring, or for a synthetic 1.0 ct one for the same price? Tempting, isn’t it?
Right at the heart of the diamond business, in Ramat Gan’s Israel Diamond Exchange near Tel Aviv, the problem is spelt out. "Put one of today’s synthetic diamonds in front of a diamantaire with 50 years’ experience ...and he still won’t be able to distinguish it from a natural diamond." This was a quote from Guy Benhamou, CEO of a top lab, in The Jerusalem Report. Detection needed "extremely sophisticated — and expensive — technology."
Manufacturers are making more and more available to the jewellery trade. They make more money from the gem market than from their main sources of sales, industrial abrasives.
Synthetic diamonds have been around for decades. Yet not until the 1990s did top quality (gem quality) synthetic diamonds appear on the market in any quantity. These were Russian inventions. This, of course, made everyone very suspicious of all Russian stones for a bit.
Now, however, American, Australian and German scientists are apparently working on producing large synthetic stones. And in a variety of colours. There are also ways of "enhancing" less-than-top quality white diamonds to up for what the earth failed to achieve. It is extremely financially rewarding to turn them into valuable coloured ones — Argyle pinks, or yellow stones.
Even De Beers has dabbled
Miners have put huge sums of money into developing devices to detect synthetic diamonds. De Beers, as a major distributor, has done the most. So it seems ironic to discover that De Beers also has an interest in synthetic diamond manufacturing.
How Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, then chairman of De Beers, entered into synthetic diamonds is a wonderful anecdote. He received shocking news in 1955 that General Electric was making them. ‘We must do it, too’, the king of diamonds allegedly thundered. They did by 1958 but kept it secret so as to secure all the worldwide patents.
While De Beers was working and filing away, GE went ahead with making — taking 10 per cent of the industrial diamond market from De Beers. Two weeks after De Beers filed the last patent in 1959 GE told the world how its process worked!
De Beers then said it would not go into for making synthetic stones unless it became "economically necessary." That was back a few years! Right now it has a diamond joint venture in Ireland with Belgium’s Umicore which is one of the major producers of industrial synthetics. Sales in 2006 were $332m and profits $2m.
Synthetic diamonds account, according to the US Geological Survey, for most of the world’s industrial diamonds. World production far exceeds the output of the natural diamond industry, totalling 569 million cts last year against 104m cts for natural near gem quality and 75 cts for natural industrial diamonds. Volume production has cut the price of industrial diamonds to a couple of dollars a carat.
Top synthetic diamond producers are Ireland, Japan, Russia, South Africa and the US. Advances in chemical vapour deposition — the main technology — are expected to bring new producers in.
Gemesis is selling like a miner
Is there money in this for the rest of us? The top producers are three Americans — Chatham, Apollo and Gemesis. All are private companies, but Gemesis has made one attempt at an IPO and is flirting with the idea of another. CEO Stephen Lux has said that Gemesis wants to grow into a "hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars type of company". That kind of growth takes a few million dollars itself. So, it needs "a substantial influx of cash, such as a stock offer."
Gemesis is fascinating. It was founded in 1996 by a top US intelligence officer, retired Brigadier General Carter Clarke. It makes fancy coloured gem stones, and has ambitions. It is even behaving like a miner. Rather than offering individual cultured diamonds in a loose, cut and polished form to retailers, it’s selling rough stones in lot form to manufacturers and designers.
So look out miners!
Erin and Isabel
