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Diamond Age Coming Soon
Roland Piquepaille writes "In 'The many facets of man-made diamonds,' Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) writes that synthetic diamonds are getting bigger and cheaper. An example: for Valentine's Day, you can buy a yellow colored man-made diamond, visibly indistinguishable from a natural one, for $4,000 per carat. This is a 30% discount when compared with a natural diamond. This very long article also says that if synthetic diamond makers are targeting the jewelry market first, these new products will have an impact on many other industries. Not only is it now possible to grow bigger diamonds, you also can choose their color. 'Colored diamonds, which are valuable and very rare, can be created by introducing carefully controlled elemental impurities into the stone,' says C&EN. For instance, nitrogen produces a yellow stone. Infusing boron into the growing diamond produces a blue gem. This overview contains some details, references and photos of men-made diamonds, but read the original article for even more technical explanations if you have the time."
A very high quality one carat diamond can easily run upwards of $10,000. Try pricing one on bluenile.com.
Diamonds are graded on color. A is the clearest and the more yellow pigment there is the farther into the alphabet the color grade. The price falls significantly as you move down the scale. Then you get all the way to Z+ which becomes "fancy yellow" and then the price goes WAY up. The yellow is caused by nitrogen impurities. The diamond manufacturing people can make a lot more per carat if they intentionally put nitrogen into their diamonds.
-B
Very true. Prior to the 20th century, white diamonds were not nearly as highly prized as colored gemstones.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
The gold industry is not a monopoly; it's a commodity metal available from dozens, if not hundreds, of sources. The vast majority of diamond production & distribution is controlled by a single company -- the DeBeers organization. Also, while the purity (and therefore value) of gold can be easily determined with a chemical test, diamond valuation is very difficult -- even experts can have very different opinions as to the value of a given stone.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
1952 was the year that man made diamonds made their debut. Despite all the innacurate blather from Wired, we can still tell man made from natural diamond.Spectroscopic examination of Chemical Vapour Deposition (CVD) created diamonds, which is the method Apollo uses, or the classic High Pressure/High temperature (HPHT) method, both have characteristic absorption spectra. Furthermore, there are some clues to be had with less esoteric equipment. CVD diamonds have a chararacteristic strain pattern in the crystal structure that is discernable. HPHT diamonds are more identifiable, as the gemmologist community has had more time to examine them... decades.
Man made emeralds and rubies have been made for decades, and in many cases are superior. Chatham offers a life time warranty on their emeralds for example. It hasn't destroyed the price of emeralds, as there are enough people who want the real thing, much like many people can paint a repica of the Mona Lisa, down to the brush strokes, but the real thing is still more expensive.
The real problem as far as the jewellery industry is concerned is that unscrupulous people try and sell these as real, and less knowledgeable jewellers pass them on to consumers. I have no problems selling man made stones as man made stones, but disclosure is the important part. I expect that this might even drive the price of diamonds that are certified as natural up, due to the difficulty but not impossibility of identification.
p.s. To those people who think that diamonds are overpriced due to DeBeers, why is it that now that DeBeers no longer controls the industry (less than half of worldwide production now goes through DeBeers), why have prices stayed stable? Could it be that the price of mining and cutting is reflected in the price of diamonds, and that the pricing actually is correct?
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
Diamonds are graded on color. A is the clearest
Actually, in the current standard of grading, D is the clearest. This originally came about because of "grade inflation" of diamonds, when it became common practice to label stones as AAA, A+++, and the like. (Similar to eBay auction feedback.)
So, the new standard began with D to avoid any confusion. In practice, no visible difference in color is apparent until you get into H, I, J color diamonds, at least in my limited experience.
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
I think I would actually prefer a man made diamond, in places like Sierra Leone and Congo diamond mining is the cause huge amounts of criminal violence and suffering.
In group behavior: 'because they're evil/morons/sheep/crazy' is not 'insightful' it's 'oversimplified'
A few years ago, there was an exellent installment of NOVA that looked into the whole natural/synthetic diamond business. Everything from the early history of how DeBeers cornered the market to the (then) latest attempts at producing gem quality crystals.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
There is even a third type of diamond that has been developed at City University in Hong Kong. It differs from the one found in nature (a cubic form) and the one found in meteorites (a hexagonal form) by the way the carbon atoms bond to each other: rhombohedral form.
Restore America: Dr. Ron Paul for President!
Somebody apparently didn't read the article. They aren't "phony" diamonds. They're _real_. Purer than the real thing in fact. On top of which, diamonds used in diamond tipped drill bits are _already_ industrial (read: artificially manufactured) diamonds. The only difference here is that traditional methods generate only diamond dust or a thin film.
Why?
Please. DeBeers to scientist. Pow!
:-)
They had synthetic diamonds for years (i mean the top quality ones too). Scientific purposes required them and have been using them. Its like Linux, we cant afford yours so well roll our own.
DeBeers is essentially trying to get the governments to forceibly label them as synthetic because otherwise no one can tell the difference.
Diamonds are a racket. I will never buy *another* one. What can I say? This logic stuff don't work to well on women
http://www.angloamerican.co.uk/
Actually, no.
Blue diamonds are not that rare. Pale yellow diamonds as well as brownish colored diamonds in the K-M range are lower in value. However Fancy Yellow diamonds in the S and higher range are quite expensive.
Blue diamonds are expensive, but are not as rare as pink or red diamonds. Pinks and reds are orders of magnitude higher in price compared to yellows and blues. As well, do not buy from a vendor who claims they sell "blue/white" diamonds because this has been called a deceptive practice when diamond vendors would sell white diamonds that had blue flourescence that made them appear slightly bluish in hue when in sunlight. Many diamonds exhibit flourescence in many colors. They usually lower the asking price as well. Blue flourescence can be a good thing if it is moderate and does not cause a milky appearance because it can offset a light yellow tone and make it appear a whiter stone.
Below is the exact quote from the Wired article with regards to dollars per carat:
"But the greatest potential for CVD diamond lies in computing. If diamond is ever to be a practical material for semiconducting, it will need to be affordably grown in large wafers. (The silicon wafers Intel uses, for example, are 1 foot in diameter.) CVD growth is limited only by the size of the seed placed in the Apollo machine. Starting with a square, waferlike fragment, the Linares process will grow the diamond into a prismatic shape, with the top slightly wider than the base. For the past seven years - since Robert Linares first discovered the sweet spot - Apollo has been growing increasingly larger seeds by chopping off the top layer of growth and using that as the starting point for the next batch. At the moment, the company is producing 10-millimeter wafers but predicts it will reach an inch square by year's end and 4 inches in five years. The price per carat: about $5."
It sounds like ultimately it will only cost $5 per carat to produce these diamonds. However, this is a price on CVD diamonds, which is still a very new process, so it likely would take time to drive the cost down. Furthermore, the price quoted above may only be achievable if diamonds are used in semiconductors, thus driving demands up and prices down. Presently, diamonds are used mainly in jewelry (ignoring industrial usages, which cares less about carats), which supports higher prices. Besides, if a man-made diamond used in jewelry is priced too low, it may even drive potential buyers away. It's the monetary value that drive up demand in jewelry, so if the price is set too low, the demand might actually diminish... Strange, I know.
-B
The term for what the diamond structure is at room temperature is "metastable", which means it isn't stable, but may as well be since you don't care what is going to happen to the diamond in a few thousand years at room temperature.
As for the chemical vapour deposition machines, the technique is simple and the machines are relatively cheap (I used to work in the same room as one in a fairly poorly funded university), and there are quite a few now being used in industry to put diamond and other coatings on things. The trick is always getting the reaction to occur at the surface, and getting things to stick.
Industrial diamond coatings that just have to be hard is one thing, but things that have to be low in flaws or have carefully placed impurities (doped semicondutor junctions) are a bit trickier, or things with large thicknesses (a dirty great big rock to put on someones finger instead of a ten micron thick layer) are also tricky. The old way of producing artificial diamonds, used by DuPont, is to wrap explosives around some graphite and set it off. This produces lots of nice little diamonds, which are great if you don't care about optical properties (they look black) or size (average around 0.1 mm). This is of course completely useless for electronics or jewelry, and it's not that easy to stick little diamonds together to make a large solid object (you need to hit it really hard and really fast, and you can't hit it fast enough in a normal atmosphere).
"At a few hundred degrees the transformation [of diamond] would occur in seconds instead of thousands of years, and you would end up with very expensive bits of graphite."
In air (which is about 20% oxygen) diamonds will withstand heat to around 1560 degrees Fahrenheit. It is not necessary for jewelers to remove diamonds from jewelry prior to soldering it with a blowtorch. If you coat a diamond with boric acid, you can heat it to higher temperatures then that.
Diamonds Lasting Forever