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Diamonds, even more than other beautiful gems, have long been associated with luxury and wealth. In the 1932 movie “Night After Night”, which was Mae West’s first film, her co-star responds to her when he is shown her jewellery, by saying: “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds,” to which she replies: “Goodness had nothing to do with it.” It’s as true now as it was back then: when a girl is given diamonds, she may well have been expected to give something in return, then or later. Unless it’s an engagement ring, of course, in which case what she has given in return is her whole life. Theoretically, anyway. Diamonds, at least in fairy stories, are supposed to represent purity. They sparkle, too, of course, and are normally a brilliant shade of white. After all, no sensible woman would want to hang a stick of charcoal round her neck or wear it on her finger
It’s surprising really, given their geological origins, what diamonds have come to represent, because they were formed deep underground in intense heat and pressure over a period of 140 to 190 million years. A diamond, says the advertisement (and several popular songs, as well as a James Bond movie), is forever. That may be a very slight exaggeration, but they certainly take a long, long time to form and they last for a very long time, too. As everyone knows, they’re very hard and can even be used to cut glass. They’re also formed from carbon. They’re very special, too and are generally considered purer and more impressive than such gemstones as rubies, sapphires and emeralds, pretty though such lesser stones are. Diamonds are formed hundreds of kilometres down in the Earth’s mantle at pressures that are 50,000 times the air pressure at sea level, while lesser (but still pretty and valuable) sparklers form in the planet’s crust.
According to my 1939 edition of Nouveau petit Larousse illustré, bought long ago on a street market in Brussels, the diamond is very special. I have translated into English to match the rest of this article this definition written in French about the diamond: “(a) Precious stone which is pure crystallized carbon: the diamond of the natural state is surrounded by a gangue of body and is the most brilliant, the hardest, the most binding of the minerals.” In mining, gangue is the commercially worthless material that surrounds, or is closely mixed with, a wanted mineral in an ore deposit. So, a diamond is desirable and of high value, anyway, once it’s been hacked clear of surrounding and valueless lumps of rock. My Penguin dictionary of science defines a diamond as “an allotrope of carbon”, which means a form of an element that has a distinctly different molecular structure to other forms of the same element. I have also looked it up in my 1850 copy of Walker’s “pronouncing dictionary”, where it is defined simply as “the most valuable and hardest of all the gems.” At least that’s concise.
Diamonds are unique. Or they were. Until scientists found out how to create them in a laboratory. Diamonds (and other types of precious gem) created in a laboratory may look exactly like the mined original and may be (and indeed are) chemically and mineralogically identical, but they are most often at least 85% cheaper or even less, once employed as a precious stone. That makes them very attractive to would-be buyers. As the London jeweller Queensmith, of the famous Hatton Garden, assures potential buyers on its website: “lab diamonds are 100% real diamonds, and are optically, chemically and physically identical to natural, mined diamonds.” They’re thermally identical, too, I’ve read, although that presumably doesn’t mean they’re “hot”. When anyone describes diamonds as “hot” it generally means they are stolen property. According to the excellent and informative Diamond Pro website, lab-grown diamonds are exactly like the rocks they emulate. “The only difference is one happens naturally in the Earth over billions of years, and the other takes just several weeks in a lab,” says one scientific article I found. Mae West could have retained her “goodness” after all, assuming her character wanted to, that is.
People find diamonds exotic and desirable because they form so far below the Earth’s surface and they glitter brightly. They are generally brought up (infrequently!) as a result of magnetic eruptions that form rocks called kimberlite, or occasionally lamproite, with diamonds accidentally hitching a lift to the surface. Most diamonds — probably around 98% — were formed up to 200 kilometres below the surface. I can remember being told as a child living in a coal mining area (the North East of England, beside what was sometimes called “the coaly Tyne” (the local river), that diamonds come from strongly compressed coal. They don’t. The radioactive isotopes they contain, however, can reveal how long ago they were formed: anything from 90-million years to 3.5-billion years and certainly long before the dinosaurs became extinct. Diamonds are very old, so don’t expect to see a diplodocus wearing one. They can even be older than stars, say astronomers.
| DIAMONDS, CUT-PRICE
The fact is that diamonds made in a laboratory, however complicated the manufacturing procedure, will always be far cheaper than their deep-mined equivalents, despite the geological similarity. Similarity? What as I saying? They are exactly the same. So, what about Amsterdam, the traditional centre of the diamond trade? It had been flourishing before the Second World War, but it was dominated by Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal. They also dominated the cutting of diamonds, although they were not allowed to join guilds because they were Jewish. In the early 20th century, 30% of males and 10% of Jewesses in the city were engaged in the diamond industry, until the city’s leading role was usurped by Antwerp, New York, Tel Aviv and Mumbai. Even so, Amsterdam still boasts the world’s greatest diamond Museum.
According to science, a diamond is simply carbon, a mineral like graphite, both of them solid. Both diamond and graphite are allotropes of carbon, among several that include graphenes and fullerances, arranged in a 3-dimensional form. A diamond consists of a giant three-dimensional network of carbon atoms. Mae West would be disappointed but could stay “good”, I suppose. Most minerologists connected with the diamond trade will tell you it’s easy to tell mined diamonds and the lab-grown variety apart, but it isn’t. When a group of scientists asked experts from a diamond merchant if a pile of diamonds were “real” they said they all were; there were no lab-grown gems at all. But the scientists knew that 5% of them were lab-grown. The other argument used by the industry is that if a woman receives a lab-grown diamond, even if it’s indistinguishable from the mined variety, she’ll think the giver doesn’t value her. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds suspiciously like a marketing ploy to me. Of course, the big (and very wealthy) diamond companies don’t want lab-grown diamonds to encroach on their market share or dent their profits. That doesn’t mean they’re always right, however. Diamonds are still a girl’s best friend and unless she’s a trained minerologist with a lot of costly equipment close at hand, she’s unlikely to know if the gift gem is a mined or lab-made diamond. After all, they’re identical, whatever the diamond merchants may tell you.
Although natural diamonds take millions of years and incredible pressures to form, scientists in Korea believe that they can produce synthetic forms of equal quality much faster. The manufacture still requires extremely high temperatures: somewhere in the region of 1,025°C, but they can then produce a film of diamond in just 150 minutes and at a pressure that is the same as that we find at sea level. Clever stuff, eh? Just don’t tell the big diamond merchants that they’re just as good.
Minerals can come in all sorts of shapes, from isometric, through tetragonal and hexagonal to orthorhombic, monoclinic and triclinic, among others. It all depends on crystallography and how many sides the final crystal has. Some people believe that crystals can be used to heal people of illnesses, with the shape determining how they can be used. There is no scientific evidence that this works and nor do I personally believe it does. It is true, however, that someone can be cured of poverty if they are given a sufficiently large gem of high value. Perhaps that is why some diamond dealers accuse the companies that are making lab-grown diamonds of “stealing” the “idea” of diamonds. I think we can all see how and why. Naturally, dealers in mined diamonds must try to belittle and to pour scorn upon the perfectly good diamonds being produced in factories or laboratories. They threaten the dealers’ profits; it’s as simple as that and has nothing to do with something being fraudulent or failing to represent the gem’s value in terms of romance (but really in terms of dollars and cents). Whether they’ve been mined or grown in a lab, they are still pretty objects that are seen as measures of romance and of the strength of a relationship. When you think about that it seems pretty silly.
| DIGGING OR MAKING?
Compare the dream with reality. In South Africa and Botswana, miners toil in hot, enclosed mineshafts under strictly-controlled security to bring rocks to the surface that contain examples of the desired gem, which is then marketed by rich companies owned by extremely rich people in a way that will make them richer. Alternatively, diamonds can be made under a recent development by dissolving carbon into liquid metal using molten iron sulfide, albeit under massive pressure of 5 to 6 gigapascals and a “seed” diamond. Now a way has been found to grow diamonds at just one atmosphere of pressure and in a moderate temperature by using a liquid metal alloy and with a “seed” diamond being required. The pressure reduction was achieved by using a carefully-prepared blend of gallium, iron, nickel and silicon, all in liquid metal form. The process, its inventors claim, involves a graphite housing in which the metals can be heated very fast and then rapidly cooled whilst being exposed to a methane and hydrogen mixture. Carbon atoms then serve as the “seeds” for the diamonds, which start to form after just a quarter of an hour, after which small fragments of diamond crystals are extruded from the liquid metal and after two-and-a-half hours, a continuous film of diamond is produced. The scientists say further refinement is needed for the process to work smoothly. At the moment, the resulting synthetic diamonds are used only in industrial processes, electronics, and in quantum computers, its inventors claim. The research was published in Nature and it’s hoped that the process will develop to produce real gems, indistinguishable from mined diamonds.
A different form of lab-made diamond is being developed by another group of scientists who say “their” diamonds will be more stable under much higher temperatures than the mined variety (which are naturally very stable) and so may be useful in conditions of extreme heat. Not all diamonds are crystalline structures with definite shapes. There are also amorphous structures, which are effectively disorganised. At the George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, researcher Howard Sheng has succeeded in creating a diamond that fits somewhere between the two types, a totally novel achievement. This new material, named “paracrystalline diamond”, is made up of paracrystallites that consist of a small number of carbon atoms and is unlike any material created before, although it’s still described as “diamond”. The creation involved crushing carbon molecules of something called buckminsterfullerene, also known as “bucky balls” using six ultra-hard carbide anvils with pressures of some thirty gigapascals, which is about 270 times the pressure found at the bottom of the Mariana trench. In temperatures that reach 12000 Celsius, bucky balls turn into paracrystalline diamond. Sheng has suggested that other substances may also have a paracrystalline form. Paracrystalline diamonds are much more stable than they are in their other states, they’re as hard as normal diamonds and may prove useful in the manufacture of saws and other industrial tools that must be capable of working reliably in very high temperatures for extended periods and remaining exceptionally sharp.
Mining diamonds is not good for the environment, which worries those trying to save the climate. Getting diamonds out of the ground involves explosives, heavy machinery and big trucks, all of them emitting carbon pollution. A new company, however, called Aether Diamonds, claims its gems are made from carbon drawn from the air and are therefore environmentally safe. According to the New York company’s co-founder and CEO, Ryan Shearman, “The manufacturing process that we’ve developed enables us to transform harmful atmospheric CO2 into gem-grade diamonds.” Impressive, eh?
Some scientists believe they can collect CO₂ in a way that revolutionises the whole industry, while helping to save the world, by taking it from the atmosphere and turning it into diamonds. A nice trick if you can pull it, you must agree? A profitable one, too, since the world’s gem companies are thought to be worth around $76-billion (that’s €70-billion, at least in 2021 and probably much more now) after its 150-year history. But that may change: two companies that are now selling lab-made diamonds have claimed to Vogue magazine that each carat of diamond removes around 20 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere. It’s a good marketing line, you must agree. Ryan Shearman told Vogue magazine that buying diamonds offsets your CO2 footprint. With the purchase of a 2-carat diamond, he pointed out to a reporter, “you’re essentially offsetting 2 ½ years of your life.” Diamonds may be forever, as the song and De Beers claim, but if he’s right you’ll last longer for buying one, if not quite forever (whatever James Bond or Shirley Bassey may say).
| HARD MATERIAL, SOFT EMOTIONS
Diamonds are famous, of course, for their hardness, brilliance, and durability but their value as a precious stone rests on four points: carat weight, colour, clarity, and cut (they’re known as “the 4 Cs”). It is exponentially harder than sapphire, its nearest gem rival, and is the stiffest and least compressible substance humans have ever discovered. Tough stuff to give to the love of your life, in fact. A diamond is made up of carbons that are bonded together tetrahedrally and can form into different shapes known as “crystal habits”. Diamond also has a very high melting point of roughly 3,500 degrees Celsius and it is also exceptionally chemically stable, not reacting with most chemicals, including acids. The intrusion of other chemicals can have a big effect on the gem’s colour, but also on its conductibility. Nitrogen, for instance (and I won’t bore you with the complicated and various ways in which it can affect the stone) can give a yellow sheen, while boron can turn gems blue, and copper can give them a red colour. Such a diamond can also conduct electricity, while the nitrogen-infused version remains an insulator. They can also be pink, green, purple or more-or-less whatever colour you choose.
Additionally, according to Design World, synthetic diamonds can have some unique and useful properties, such as the broadest electromagnetic transmission spectrum of any material. It can also carry very low currents even under high voltages and has the highest-known resistance to thermal shock and the greatest thermal conductivity, among a host of other unique properties that are valuable to industry. Traditionally shaped, they can also delight a lady (or some ladies), if required. What’s more, according to the excellent Design World publication, synthetic diamonds can be tailored for a particular process. Natural diamonds, wonderful though they undoubtedly are, have a rarity and variability that restricts their usefulness to industry and to various processes that industry needs. What is more: a synthetic diamond is the strongest material known to man, which makes it a very valuable commodity. According to Design World, the unique properties of a synthetic diamond can “make it ideally suited for a wide variety of applications, including precision machining, drilling and crushing, optics, acoustics, electronics, sensors and water treatment”. And it can also go into beautiful jewellery, in which form its many other industrial advantages are unlikely to be tested. Additionally, synthetic diamond is chemically and biologically inert and can survive in severe physical, chemical and radioactive environments that would destroy lesser materials. No wonder the world’s extremely wealthy diamond dealers are nervous. Once again quoting from Design World: “Synthetic diamond has the widest spectral band of any known material—extending from ultraviolet to far infrared and the millimetre-wave microwave band. Coupled with its mechanical and thermal properties, this makes it the ideal ‘window’ material for many industrial, R&D, defence and laser applications, particularly in the production of laser optics where synthetic diamond provides optimum exit windows for CO2 lasers, such as those used in automotive cutting applications.” In other words, it’s very useful stuff.
In nature, sapphires, emeralds and rubies are the most sought-after of precious stones after the diamond. A sapphire is a kind of mineral known as corundum, made up of aluminium oxide together with such trace elements as iron, titanium, chromium, vanadium or magnesium. They are what give it is colour, which is normally blue, of course, but can also be yellow, purple, orange, green or white, depending on the mix of elements it contains. A ruby is exactly the same kind of mineral as a sapphire, but when the corundum in it is red, it is called a ruby and it is the blood-red variety that is the most valuable (and sought-after). Emeralds, on the other hand, are a variety of the mineral known as beryllium, and they derive their splendid blue-green colour from the fact that they contain traces of chromium and/or vanadium. Emeralds are always green, but the depth of their colour and intensity may vary. The gems differ in other ways, too. Sapphires, for instance, formed deep in Earth’s crust more than 150-million years ago, crystallizing slowly in igneous or metamorphic rocks that are rich in aluminium and totally devoid of silicon, one of the commonest minerals on the planet. Rubies are also corundums, which are a crystalline form of aluminium oxide, typically containing traces of iron, titanium, vanadium, and chromium. It is a rock-forming mineral but unlike sapphires they come from South East Asia and are found in such places as Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Thailand and Afghanistan (the Mujahideen never showed me any when I was there). That brings us to emeralds, derived from beryl, which forms in hexagonal crystals in hydrothermal vents or magmatic pegmatites. They require just the right temperatures and space to develop and must be close to beryllium, aluminium, silicon and oxygen. The problem is that beryl is colourless so there must be traces of chromium and vanadium nearby to turn the beryl green. Not surprisingly, the process takes millions of years. They are generally found in Columbia, Brazil and Zambia, although a few have turned up elsewhere. I have not heard of anyone seeking to grow these gems in a laboratory, probably because the end product would be less valuable and have fewer alternative (but still lucrative) applications. Even so, it seems highly likely that some scientific person is seeking simple ways to make sapphires, rubies and emeralds in a laboratory somewhere. After all, they are still valuable and popular for jewellery in any case.
As for actual diamonds, they’re only to make the dealers rich. One worker in the squalid conditions of Surat’s slums and workshops in India’s Gujarati district is Chandu Bhai, who first arrived in the city to seek work in the industry at the age of 12, sleeping under the wheels that he would learn to use to grind and shape the diamonds to prepare them for sale, if only to the very wealthy. He is now middle-aged. “As I got older,” he told an American documentary maker who visited him in the workshop he shares with many others, “I realised that we are not working for ourselves, because the diamond polisher who makes the diamond will never get the chance to own one himself.” Owning diamonds means you are rich. Making them, on the other hand, means you never will be, forever surrounded by the symbols of a world of which you cannot be a part. For the diamond workers, what little shine there ever was (if it ever, indeed, existed) rubbed off years ago.
I can understand why De Beers and the others who deal in and sell these precious pebbles from deep underground are not keen on the idea of scientists being able to recreate their valuable product quite quickly and yet with similar properties – even identical properties – in a factory somewhere using chemicals. However you may view the trade, the clear and simple fact remains that diamonds can now be manufactured, indistinguishable from the mined variety, and sold at a fraction of the price. It seems like a good idea to me, as an outsider: if diamonds are a girl’s best friend, as the old saying goes, perhaps it’s better if they’re more affordable for her (or her gentleman friend). Unless you’re a minerologist who carries around a scanning microscope that you know how to use, no-one will know the difference, whatever the wealthy dealers might say. As Mae West famously said: “I have always felt a gift diamond shines so much better than one you buy for yourself.” Don’t forget the gift wrapping.
Jim.Gibbons@europe-diplomatic.eu
| MEMORIAL DIAMONDS MADE FROM ASHES OR HAIR
Diamonds made from cremation ashes, known as memorial diamonds, are a unique and meaningful way to preserve the memory of a loved one. This process, which transforms cremated remains into a beautiful gem, is both scientifically fascinating and emotionally powerful.
Cremation ashes primarily consist of carbon, which is also the essential element in diamonds. Through advanced technology, carbon is extracted from the ashes and subjected to conditions that mimic the natural diamond formation process. High temperatures and pressures, similar to those found deep within the Earth, cause the carbon atoms to crystallize and form a diamond. This process can take several weeks to months, depending on the size and specifications of the diamond desired.
Memorial diamonds can be customized in terms of color, size, and cut, making each one as unique as the person it commemorates. The color of the diamond can vary from clear to shades of yellow, blue, or even pink, depending on the specific trace elements present in the ashes.
Algordanza, a Swiss company specialised in ashes to diamond needs at least 500g of cremation ashes or at least 5g of hair. From the ashes or hair they extract the carbon, which is then converted into graphite allowing the growth of a raw diamond or multiple diamonds using a real diamond seed. Their prices start at € 2.300 for a 0.30 carat diamond.
For many, these diamonds serve as a tangible and beautiful reminder of their loved one, offering comfort and a sense of closeness. They can be set in various types of jewelry, such as rings or pendants, becoming a personal keepsake that can be passed down through generations.
