Diamonds developed in the lab

Have you ever dreamt of owning a fancy color diamond of the highest quality but yes with a lower price tag? Science has made it possible to duplicate the process followed by Mother Nature and which rivals the real thing in both beauty and sparkle. The end result is that we are coming into an era where the sale of lab manufactured diamonds is going to challenge the annual billion dollar sales of natural diamonds.

American Diamond manufacturers like Apollo diamonds use laser cutters to cut seeds from diamonds and then expose these seeds to carbon gas inside a vacuum chamber. The carbon atoms start sticking to the seeds and a diamond can be formed in 2 to 3 weeks. Elsewhere other corporations use imported Russian machinery to recreate the intense heat and pressure filled conditions during natural diamond formation. The introduction of carbon into this controlled environment results in the formation of shiny yellow or canary diamonds. These diamonds are also known as cultured diamonds. Only an expert eye with the aid of a microscope can distinguish them from their real natural counterparts. The laboratory generated diamonds can hugely open up the diamond wholesale market with their cheaper prices and greater accessibility.

The sudden eruption of this technology had diamond majors scurrying for cover. De Beers went to the extent of saying that these cultured diamonds were imitations and degraded the most precious stone in the world. De Beers has also started supplying gemologists with equipment to distinguish natural diamonds from lab cultured ones.

However traders dealing in cultured diamonds feel that each of the manmade stones has an individual certificate with an inscribed number. This number is the same as on the cultured stone. This practice according to dealers protects the consumer in the event that a synthetic stone is sold off claiming it to be a natural stone.

So what is the verdict? That question still remains as it is incoherently difficult to distinguish a natural diamond from a cultured one. There is also lack of availability of proper detection technology at present. The consumer still remains in doubt, whether or not to go for synthetic diamonds. The strategy would be to find a good and trustworthy jeweler who will provide the best value for money. In contrast people who have bought synthetic diamonds seem to appreciate its beauty and do not harbor any uneasy qualms over not buying a natural diamond.