The process of creating a diamond naturally takes between 1 and 3.3 billion years. Conversely, a lab-grown diamond can now be created in 150 minutes. But despite being an ethical and environmentally-friendly alternative to the real thing, the value of lab-grown diamonds has plummeted in recent years. Manufacturers are doing various things to battle the stigma and increase their value by being carbon neutral and using recycled metals.
About halfway through is where this article gets really interesting. Swiss jeweler LOEV has partnered with lab growers Ammil to produce a line of Swiss-made jewelry by relying on renewable energy sources. 90% comes from hydroelectric power, and the rest comes from solar and biomass generation. Now, on to the process itself.
![A lab-grown diamond 'cake' before the excess carbon is lasered away.](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/diamonds-inner.webp?w=400)
Growing a diamond starts with a seed — a thin wafer of diamond laser-shaved off of an existing stone, and this is placed in a vacuum chamber and subjected to hydrocarbon gas, high heat (900 to 1200 °C), and pressure.
Then, a microwave beam induces carbon to condense and form a plasma cloud, which crystallizes and forms diamonds. The result is called a ‘cake’ — a couple of diamond blocks. The excess carbon is lasered away, then the cake is processed and polished. This is known as the chemical vapor deposition method (CVD).
There is another method of growing diamonds in a lab, and that’s known as the high-pressure, high-temperature (HPHT) method. Here, a small bit of natural diamond is used to seed a chamber filled with carbon, which is then subjected to high pressure and temperatures. The carbon crystallizes around the seed and grows around a millimeter each day.
As the industry evolves, lab-grown diamonds present a sustainable alternative to natural diamonds. But the consumer is always in charge.
Once you’ve got a stone, what then? Just use 3D printing to help create the ring and setting.
It’s not that surprising that synthetic diamonds aren’t comparable in value to naturally-occurring ones. When the main quality of something is its rarity, saying “Hey, look, these are just as good but not as rare!” isn’t really a great marketing line.
Natural diamonds are not ‘naturally’ rare. It’s an artificial scarcity, explicitly engineered to drive the price up astronomically and often enforced – literally – at gunpoint. Arguably, artificial diamonds are MORE scarce than natural ones would be without the machinations and outright crimes of, for example, DeBeers.
Artificial scarcity hasn’t been true for a while.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzXeWlRzBqs
Thanks! That was fascinating and most informative. It’s good to have a misconception set right.
He even said in the video that scarcity is artificial but peak production was in 2005 which means scarcity/value is switching to actual scarcity, but that doesn’t indicate how much scarcity is actual scarcity currently. Also there are plenty of veins in the world that have intentionally not been mined. Russia discovered multiple veins estimated to have a combined value in the hundreds of trillions, and the intentionally are not mining them so their current working mines will hold value.
https://www.mining.com/de-beers-selling-diamonds-less-industry-isnt-happy/
From 2018, not being a diamond buyer I don’t know if they followed through with this idea of undercutting the synthetic market.
But it is guaranteed 100% blood free!! Unlike read diamonds which may have been farmed with blood.
read? I meant real! it’s 2024, why is there still no edit button?
But diamond has a LOT of unique properties. Especially if you can get isotopically pure diamond, but even gem-quality diamond is pretty useful, not to mention the industrial kind. The only case where its main value is rarity is perhaps when you only consider its use in jewelry, and even then it’s still not just rare – it’s still got favorable optical and mechanical properties.
And you’re also leaving out some context when you say that the reason for artificial diamond being cheaper is that it’s not as rare. But first, it’s still pretty rare, because any high quality diamond is not something you pass out as party favors. And natural diamond has historically been made much rare than it had to be, since supply has long been very controlled. It’s still sort of about rarity – you almost certainly have no particular sentimental feelings toward the mine from which the diamond came, if you even paid attention to that. The more important difference is that working to grow a diamond is a variable but likely substantial amount better than working to mine a natural one, and is quite open to competition or eventually being scaled up. Buying natural diamonds, you’re paying a premium in the well-founded hope that because someone labored (and was very likely exploited or suffered) in one of the limited number of active mines in order to find your shiny rock, then the exclusivity is less likely to be tanked by competition coming in and doing the exact same thing.
You as a buyer ideally want to make sure that there’s just enough sold for you to afford the one you want and not so much sold that you can’t feel like you’re better than other people for being able to afford it. If advances mean it is now just as easy to get the exact same substance but larger and purer, and competition is open with no particular need for workers to suffer, then to protect the original sources, the new ones must be in some way invalidated, and that’s what marketing has done. Of course, if there’s enough demand, you as a seller have to try and undo that if you’d like to cash in, but you’ll probably have to find ways to say yours are going to not have whatever problems you invented before. I’m just speculating that there’ll be some good examples of this.
” value of lab-grown diamonds has plummeted…”
The value has increased. It’s the cost that has plummeted.
Marketing 101: Never confuse value (the customer’s perception of its worth), cost (the effort to provide the goods), and price (what the customer will pay). Three different things.
There’s probably a Ferengi rule number for that.
Ferengi rule number, wait… Is there a Ferengi rule book?
So I’ve searched the web and this is what I’ve found:
http://noelgreen.com/ferengi/Rules-of-Acquisition.pdf
R.O.A #3, 20, 82, and 299. But my life is always #109… Dignity and an empty sack is worth an empty sack.
And these are the RULES of Acquisition….if they were the SUGGESTIONS of Acquisition no one would buy them – Grand Negus Zek (paraphrased)
I misread your comment!
I read your -wife- is always #109!
Oops!
Diamonds for wedding rings is no longer green.
But they’re less blood stained.
Since when have wedding rings had diamonds?! Is that a US thing? Here in the UK it’s engagement rings which get diamonds (or, traditionally, rubies or sapphires), and wedding rings (or “bands”) are just gold, no stones.
It could be a language difference, but it’s a done thing to make the wedding band match the engagement ring and combine with it to wear as one unit wedding ring in the future.
Yes, my wife’s wedding band (with supplemental diamonds) was soldered(?) to her engagement ring (with solitaire diamond).
In The Netherlands, I guess it’s the same as in the UK. Wedding rings are quite simple rings made of gold, with an engraving on the inside. The reason is that you’ll wear it day and night, and are supposed to never take it off again. So it needs to be easy to wear and practical, while still being of sentimental value and made of a precious material. Also shouldn’t accidentally rip your face open in your sleep.
Our engagement rings are generally also of higher value, could have diamonds. Because by tradition you’re supposed to marry within 3 months after engagement. And you don’t wear it day and night. So the engagement ring is often more expensive and ornamental than the wedding ring.
People who need to work with their hands or who otherwise can’t wear it all the time often put the ring on a chain or somewhere else on their person for the duration, or get a silicone ring as a part-time placeholder, or something.
But I agree with you that simple bands and some sort of meaningful engraving would be preferable versus some of the options. The general pattern as far as I know is just outdated social status related stuff. The man repeatedly buys the woman expensive stuff that gets in the way of her doing anything, because only he is supposed to need things that are practical.
So in the worst cases, he might have a simple band, which has to be made somewhat expensive anyway for status so perhaps it’s platinum, while she has as much as they can fit onto a fragile ring without being judged as too flashy. In the more normal cases the wedding addition may be like Not-Ren’s wife’s but may not even add any more diamonds than the first one. Maybe a few small emeralds if she likes those, for example.
“The process of creating a diamond naturally takes between 1 and 3.3 billion years.”
…or milliseconds? Small diamonds have been found in the remains of ancient meteor strikes.
Just to add to this – There’s no reason to think diamonds take any longer to make inside the earth than inside a laboratory under the same pressure/temperature conditions. Certainly they can form from longer time scale shocks as you mentioned and possibly shorter timescale ones. All that being said it isn’t necessarily intuitive to understand when talking of diamonds found in million year old rock and an easy mistake to make.
I did not get my wife a diamond, she didn’t want one. It’s all marketing nonsense anyway.
Interested to know how scalable and the production cost on these lab grown ones though.
In 2021 the production of 3 million polished carats of lab grown diamonds accounted for 5% of the jewelry industries sales. An industry report at the time stated this was expected to grow to 10% by 2925 and 20% by 2030.
China currently produces in excess of 10 billion carats of synthetic diamond a year for use in abrasive applications. So scalability of jewelry grade diamonds is surely only a matter of acceptance and demand.
it costs about $300 to $500 per carat to produce a lab-grown diamond,
They typically sell for $600-1300 per carat.
Natural diamonds sell for $1,910 – $15,650 per carat with an average price of $4,280/carat.
>expected to grow to 10% by 2025 and 20% by 2030.
oops miskeyed the year.
Per usual, people neglect another (significantly more environmentally friendly) source of diamonds: vintage, antique, or otherwise pre-owned diamonds. Why waste the time and energy on creating a lab grown diamond or mining natural diamonds when perfectly good stones already abound?
Also consider grave robbing!
Mugging widows: It’s the green choice for todays environmentally conscious young couple out ring-shopping
Do people have access to so many pieces of used jewelry in great shape that they will just find what they want ready-made? Because otherwise, if you have to buy a complete piece of jewelry at normal prices and reduce its resale to that of scrap gold and a “used” gem, then get someone to sell you a new setting that matches it and pay them to put the old gem into it… you may or may not actually be better off than just looking through other options. Including other gems, or other means of expressing what you want to express.
You’d be surprised! When an antique stone is taken out of it’s setting, it isn’t usually just melted down. I’ve been to plenty of jewelry shops that have antique/vintage settings that they’re happy to put a new stone into as well. I’ve also seen people take a stone off one ring and put it into another old setting that they liked better for a relatively nominal resetting fee. It just depends on what you’re looking for. From what I know, it’s at least an economical way to get a natural stone.
Huh, okay. I remember once being told that if you took the gems out of jewelry, it’d most likely not fetch much more than scrap to sell. Good if there’s more flexibility now.
Too bad lab diamonds can’t be a solution for carbon sequestering.
Theoretically they can, but it’s exactly the same problem with every other proposed ‘solution’.
Scalability…
And energy balance: if you need to input more energy (and thus equivalent CO2 emission) to the sequestering process than you sequester, you’re only making the problem worse.
“But just use solar/nuclear/wind/etc to power the sequestering” sounds good, but it would be even BETTER to use that solar/nuclear/wind/etc to produce grid power in the first place and avoid the emissions you’re sequestering to start with. UNTIL the grid is 100% non-carbon-emitting its always preferable to replace carbon-emitting grid power with non-emitting power rather than using that non-emitting power for sequestration.
Whatever the public perception of synthetic diamonds, I *highly* doubt that the carbon footprint of the production has real significance. That would be eclipsed by feelings regarding the ‘realness’, by qualms around natural diamonds and by affordability.
Also, is it me, or does the second paragraph seems out of place? The power source being renewable has no influence on the technical production process and as such is not interesting here. And since it doesn’t seem like a relevant costumer concern either, it sounds an awful lot like typical marketing gobbledygook to grab ‘sustainability’ attention. With a single company highlighted… is this an ad?
Looking at linked wired article: “uses affiliate links”. So it is an ad, just not from HaD. A little more editing next time please :)
Biomass is NOT sustainable, it’s plain greenwashing. Burning biomass creates a load of CO2 that contributes to the rising of the total CO2 level, even if you plant new trees that you will burn again after 20-25 years.
Stop calling this renewable, please.
as I understand, diamond jewelry for weddings is an American thing from the 1940’s. Dabeers had massive parties with the biggest movie star wearing extravagant diamond arrangements that insanely over insured. “insured for $1 million” implies WORTH $1 M. The trick worked. My memory may be faulty.