Sep 9, 2008

Lab-grown diamonds sparkle blood-freeBy Justin BertonSFGate.com

San Francisco — Inside a small hotel room at the downtown Marriott recently, a businessman named Stephen Lux gently opened a jeweler’s box and placed a shoestring-thin diamond necklace on the table.

The 64-carat, canary yellow diamonds looked like they were worth millions – “Virtually priceless,” Lux said. “But we could sell it to you for, say, $500,000.”

Why the discount?

Lux’s Gemesis Corp. is the largest maker of lab-grown diamonds, also known in the industry as cultivated diamonds, which sell for about a third of the price of the mined gems.

Gemesis grows the stones in boxy machines in a warehouse in Sarasota, Fla., and each produces a rough 3-carat diamond in about four days – a process that takes Earth millions of years. Natural diamonds form hundreds of miles below Earth’s surface, when carbon gets trapped under great amounts of pressure, is heated and then rises to the surface.

“These are diamonds,” Lux said. “Just from a different origin: a lab.”

A boost in credibility

Lux and his colleagues were in town to host the first all-lab-grown diamond show in one of the Marriott’s conference rooms. They had picked San Francisco as a test market because of the city’s “forward-thinking, tech-savvy” populace, Lux said.

Gemesis has been fine-tuning its diamond-making machines since 2000, but it’s only now that the diamonds are ready for a mass market. If local diamond retailers snap up the stones, the yellow and green products – as well as purple ones – could shimmer from local display cases this holiday season.

But first, admirers of colorless diamonds will need to be convinced that the lab-grown spoils are just as good as the gems that come from Earth’s mantle.

Rob Bates, who covers the diamond industry for the trade magazine Jewelers’ Circular Keystone, said the man-made product received a credibility boost last year when the Gemological Institute of America, the industry’s authority on valuing gems, began grading and certifying the stones just as it does mined diamonds. Jewelers at the institute found that lab-grown stones are identical to natural diamonds, which means both are the hardest material known to man.

Still, Bates said there has been little impact on the overall mined diamond industry so far. With emerging diamond consumer markets in China and India, and no major mines scheduled to open worldwide in the near future, mined diamonds are becoming scarce and more expensive.

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