Lab-Grown Diamonds Come into Their Own
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If you're buying raw carbon in the form of coal, it costs about $40 per ton.
The rest is manufacturing details. I know there's a lot of manufacturing details, but the cost of the inputs suggests that diamonds in bulk could be much much cheaper.
If someone showed up tomorrow with a check for several million dollars, I believe we could "disrupt" the current diamond pricing within 3-5 years. However, as I mentioned in another post in this thread, raw cost of production will still keep those "disrupted" non-R&D diamonds much more expensive than moissanite, CZs, sapphires and other gemstones.
Diamond is a form of carbon, and its growth is more-or-less determined by nature. The cost of production over time will be more similar to an industry like steel, than assembled goods like TVs or computers. There are improvements to be made, but they are more linear over time, than exponential breakthroughs.
For raw carbon, we use a highly refined and purified form of graphite. If you used the $40/ton coal, you would not be successful in growing jewelry-quality diamonds, and even if you did, the other costs wouldn't really change your ultimate price much.
Another analogy is gold. You can buy a 1 Troy-ounce bar of 24 karat gold for a bit over $1000. However, a solitaire engagement ring with much less actual gold content can cost more than $1000. People ask why the jewelry is more expensive, but don't include the cost for refining and alloys, design, 3D printing or molds, casting and investments, polishing, setting, shipping, ring boxes, and all the other overhead associated with turning that gold bar into a sold, ready-to-wear ring.
We are currently focused on high-quality single-crystal diamonds. There are many potential research paths with diamond, but slow and limited research capacity and market potential. Element Six (a De Beers subsidiary) currently has the most potential for developing non-standard diamond applications.
1. BARS press. It is a Russian design from the 1980s capable of up to 2-3 carat polished sizes, and was one of the first methods to commercially grow jewelry-grade diamonds. It is much less efficient than modern presses though.
2. Cubic press. This is a much larger 3-axis press used primarily in China to spontaneously grow diamond grit and powder. Some of these have been converted and upgraded to run longer cycles needed for large single crystals. These can grow multiple diamonds at a time or fewer larger diamonds, and have been used to grow the largest diamonds currently available (5-10 carat), however success rates and control within the larger growth cell are still low. We are in the process of developing our own modern cubic press (rather than a refurbished grit press).
3. Single axis. This our own in-house design. It has similar growth capabilities as a BARS press, but is much more efficient with greater control and can grow multiple diamonds simultaneously. For qualified parties, we can sell these presses as well as license the IP and diamond growth "recipes".
CVD reactors are basically a vacuum chamber with plasma over a growth surface. That surface holds diamond plates, which are just thin slices of diamond, and usually come from larger CVD or HPHT single-crystal diamonds. Methane provides a carbon source, which is broken up into its elemental components by the plasma. The carbon "rains" down onto the diamond seed plates and basically grows straight up, so the finished dimensions are limited by the starting length and width of the seed plate. Some CVD reactors use microwaves to assist while others do not. There are a few companies that sell complete CVD reactor systems, but no one I am aware of that offers IP or "recipes", so those would have to be developed on your own.
Otherwise, for HPHT, you can find used BARS presses, mostly in Russia. They are certainly capable of growing diamonds, but are like comparing emissions, performance and fuel efficiency of a 1980s carbureted vehicle to a 2016 fuel-injected vehicle. Used cubic presses can be found in China, however those presses were built for grit and powder, which run short cycles (<1 hour), and would need to be converted and upgraded to sustain strict parameters for multi-day and multi-week cycles.
Companies sell new CVD reactors, as they have more applications than just diamonds, but they do not come with any diamond knowhow.
With all of those, you will have to develop your own recipes and growth cells or methods. Unless you have plenty of time and advanced degrees in physics, chemistry and/or material science, it will probably be an exercise in futility.
The original Florida-based Gemesis is a good example of this. They were VC funded and bought BARS presses, that at-the-time, could only grow orange diamonds. Gemesis made dozens if not hundreds of these presses however, when they ran out of money years later, they could still only grow orange diamonds. A Singapore company bought those presses (mostly to grow CVD seeds and HPHT-treat CVD rough) and to my knowledge, still can't reliably grow blue or colorless diamonds with those BARS presses.
For a code analogy, they basically "forked" the orange recipes when they bought the machines from Russia, and haven't been able to merge any upstream advancements since. BARS have basically been deprecated, so that stack is no longer developed.
From there, the cost for polishing, grading reports, jewelry, logistics, marketing, etc. are all basically the same whether the diamond was grown or mined. White grown diamonds are generally 10-30% less expensive at retail than mined diamonds, however most of that is just due to lean, vertically integrated companies. We grow, cut, distribute and retail our diamonds as well as jewelry, so have a bigger slice of the rough-to-retail pie. That extra margin isn't huge, but is enough to sustain the business as well as progress the research, development and production. Mined diamonds pass through many more hands between the mine and the consumer, and each step adds some markup. A mined diamond entity that only sells rough, only polishes, or only buys and sells polished mined diamonds at wholesale would see smaller margins, but that can be made up for in greater volume of mined diamonds traded.
It is also worth pointing out that the diamond success rate is sustainable, but not every growth cycle is profitable. While we can monitor the external HPHT equipment, we cannot see the actual diamond growth until after the cycle is complete. For example, a cycle may run for two weeks, but we find out afterward that it stopped growing on day three, or there were some bad inclusions on day six, and what could have been polished into a one carat gemstone (and cost the same to grow) may not yield anything, or may only yield a much smaller gemstone. The total production cost has to be averaged over the total successful sales. This includes growing diamonds that sit in inventory for a long time due to lower clarity, less desirable colors, etc.
HPHT (high pressure, high temperature) grows from a tiny diamond seed (<1mm) and the growth sort of "snowballs". Blue and white/colorless are a hexacubic type shape while yellow are a truncated octahedron shape.
White/Colorless: http://d.neadiamonds.com/images/rough-hpht-white.jpg Yellow (industrial recipe): http://d.neadiamonds.com/images/rough-hpht-yellow.jpg
CVD (chemical vapor deposition) grows basically straight up from a diamond plate, so are generally cuboids. Spontaneous polycrystalline diamond can grow on the sides, but is hard, black and unusable for the same applications as single-crystal. CVD (poly is cut off): http://d.neadiamonds.com/images/rough-cvd-brown.jpg
When CVD grows brown or gray, it is usually due to atomic-level defects in the diamond, which can be healed through post-growth treatment, turning it a near colorless or light yellow color. This CVD photo was HPHT treated to a light yellow, then further treated to become a nice fancy pink. It is also possible to have CVD grow near colorless, without requiring treatment.
We sell diamonds for jewelry on our retail website: https://d.neadiamonds.com They are also available for high-value industrial and wholesale jewelry applications.
See my other post for other industrial applications: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13088523
Outside of the growth cell, the machine and environment also influence growth. Temperature and pressure ranges, tolerances and gradients of the press all factor in to the final quality of the diamond. Ambient room temperature and humidity as well as conditions during the growth cell preparation play a role too.
For consumers though, when considering two 1.0ct G color, VS2 clarity round polished diamonds (for example), it doesn't really matter what process it came from, who grew it or what size or shape the rough diamond was.
TL;DR They have very similar cost structures as mined diamonds (rough [mine vs. grow], polishing, grading, etc.), plus the R&D and failure/success rates.
Can a non specialist jeweller tell the difference?
They are 100% real diamond, just grown instead of mined. A typical jeweler cannot conclusively identify a diamond's origin, however gemological grading labs with more advanced equipment can. Companies are trying to develop inexpensive testing devices, like exist for cubic zirconia and moissanite, but so far they are expensive and limited to those major grading labs.
There are a few ways to identify the grown origin: -Most grown diamonds sold for jewelry have independent grading reports from gemological grading labs (GIA, IGI, EGL, GCAL, etc.) identifying them as grown. Part of this grading process is to laser inscribe the diamond with wording like "Laboratory Grown". This inscription can be read on the diamond with 10-20x magnification.
-Inclusions can be different in grown diamonds, however are graded on the same clarity scale as mined diamonds (VVS, VS, SI, etc.). Metallic inclusions are extremely rare in mined diamonds, but common in HPHT-grown, since they grow in a molten metal solution. CVD inclusions can be graphite or have planar characteristics.
-Grown white/colorless diamonds are all "Type IIa", which means few to no impurities. Less than 2% of mined diamonds are type IIa. ~98% of mined diamonds are type Ia and actually contain more nitrogen than grown fancy yellow diamonds (type Ib). Equipment that can check these impurity levels are good initial screening tests (2% false positive for IIa mined diamonds). For completeness, type IIb contain trace amounts of boron, and make the diamond blue and electrically conductive. These IIb diamonds can eventually be used as semiconductors.
-Disclosure. We are proud of our grown diamonds, and the other producers are too. Most of our customers buy them because they are made by scientists and technicians in high tech labs. It took longer to grow jewelry quality diamonds than it did to put humans on the moon. Mined diamonds do support economies in remote and third-world regions of the world, but can come with their own environmental and social issues.
The best one seems to be Moissanite, which also has the rather pedestrian name of silicon carbide. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moissanite
Here's a strong opinion about why diamonds suck and you should go with alternatives: http://diamondssuck.com/
Lastly, a more dispassionate analysis: http://www.doamore.com/diamonds-vs-moissanite/
Moissanite can be 90% cheaper than equivalent diamond, not just 30%.
Yep - silicon carbide is very cool. It's weakly birefringent, which can be noticeable in larger gems, but the refractive index is larger than that of diamond, and the dispersion is greater too.
No matter from whence your gems come, the nuclei were largely forged at the heart of a star, same as everything but the hydrogen in your body.
The only people to whom I recommend natural stones are those with a connection to the earth or to a specific place. Geologists have a soft spot for natural diamonds. When considering an engagement ring for my now-wife, I spent a lot of time looking at sapphires from Montana. Only the risk of shattering them in a tension setting kept me from going that route.
The final thing that nudged me into synthetic stones was looking into the open-pit Cripple Creek gold mine. The environmental destruction we create in search of precious materials is considerable. Synthetic stones are made from carbon, sand, and electric power, all comparatively easy on the planet.
Diamonds are cool. So are lots of other choices. Look around; it's neat.
Apparently moissanite just came off patent protection last year so it is an even better option now than when some of those resources were created.
Both pretty but I can't see myself spending much on either.
Anyway I think they use carbon for its electrical properties, not the strength.
http://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-are-turning-nuclear-w...
You want to make a long lasting low power nuclear battery? Go for it. But don't try to trick people into thinking you are doing anything about nuclear waste.
The nuclear waste that causes problems is the type with neutron decay that is able to activate nearby elements. That is tricky to dispose of, and difficult to store.
According to the article I linked, it does need to be safely stored, since it's dangerous to touch or ingest, and it needs that storage for a long period of time.
Cutting and polishing, however, should be comparable to any other gemstone.
"...a...what-a-nite?"
"A Mossainite. Artificial, spurious, not-genuine and it's worth....fuck all"
The "diamond alternative" meme is becoming increasingly popular with our generation, such that I predict that in a few generations nobody will care to buy "real" diamonds for engagement purposes. When this happens, the price of diamonds will fall dramatically (if it hasn't already by that point).
Diamonds are so overrated.
when I see women boasting with their ground diamond jewelry they are telling me couple of things: a) they are a bit ignorant; b) they have sheepish crowd mentality; c) they put too much emphasis on what others thing about themselves, which just shows other personality issues; d) and most importantly they are willingly supporting genocide and enslavement for all above
which is OK, good to know immediately who you are dealing with
So if the point of buying a diamond is to show your love for someone by sacrificing a meaningful amount of money, it becomes important to distinguish between stones that someone actually sacrificed a substantial amount of money to purchase and stones where someone didn't sacrifice as much.
We'd do better to address the insane custom of needing an expensive proxy for love. Think about it...if the custom were for a man to take two months salary, withdraw it from the bank in $100 bills, drop to one knee and present it to his girlfriend while asking her to marry him, we'd find that insulting. It would be like he's paying for love/sex, which our society deems dirty or objectifying to women. But substitute a glittery rock mounted on a hunk of metal, both largely obtained by heaping further misery on various third-world locations, and we somehow find that acceptable? Accepting the money would make her a whore, but accepting the ring just means her boyfriend loves her?
It's illogical and hopefully more women start making it known to their boyfriends that the ring isn't necessary and all that extra money, if it needs to be spent on something impractical, can be spent on making the wedding just a bit more lavish.
Obviously this isn't exactly like that, but I imagine there will still be a market for mined diamonds and they'd be priced accordingly.
Most consumers buy diamonds on emotion, not ratio. If you're buying something to carve into glass with, you don't care. De Beers (very successfully, so far) markets natural diamonds as something you buy to express your love with. If you did _that_ rationally, you likely wouldn't buy a diamond at all.
Because for some consumers, the scarcity (artificial though it may be) of mined diamonds is what they are buying for.
And because for other consumers, ethical concerns that favor artifical diamonds are what they are buying for.
In either case, knowing that you are getting what you want and not something else is a concern.
> This is a purely emotional response.
Value is always subjective and largely emotional.
I would love to see some sort of tariff or sanction placed on mined diamonds to make them restrictively expensive. There is simply no need for them any longer.
Step one - find a rare mineral that at this point has value close to zero. It is rare but worthless.
Step two - obtain monopoly on mining it or control it as much as you can (buy spots with dense occurrence, etc)
Step three - throw money at important and powerful people (such as Spielberg, so that in his new movie today's Marilyn Monroe is wearing your ore as a form of very high luxury) other media stars, politicians etc.
Step four - continue with excellent PR until enough wives or soon-to-be wives come to their soon-to-be husbands and request them to update their luxury status by buying your ore.
Step five - collect trillions of dollars across the globe, by tightly controlling your ore and its harvest.
Edit: step six - rinse and repeat for 50 years getting yourself even wealthier.
Various sports. Formula One, for instance, is the epitome of racing despite there being plenty of other ways to race cars.
Bottled water. Competes with a spout that everyone has several of in their home, yet people still pay up for it.
Maybe not exactly billionaires, but
If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion. :)
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/acaxis/key-and-peele-the-heist
It's a skit by Key & Peele describing a genius plan for a bank heist. I won't ruin the punchline by going any further.
If they had to hand it over to the Customs Officers those holes would suddenly be less attractive.
Sure. On the other hand, if the synthetic diamonds were the flawed ones, you'd be saying "not everyone will settle for imperfection".
Or, modify the growing process so that it has a greater element of chance to it? (this is likely multi-dimensional)
A diamonds primary value is the history of it's making. People are unfortunately always going to be paying more for a diamond which has been digged out by hard labour than created in a lab.
Keep in mind the value of diamonds is mostly a perceptive one. I am pretty sure if you only did synthetic diamonds it would soon fail to be valuable as the "womans best friend"
Really, diamond is one of those stones where it is the less true. Partially because of brilliant marketing, partially because in such a tiny clear stone the effect is mostly to dull it (speaking of it physical characteristics, not the emotional response).
That is not the case in Rubies or Sapphires. Emerald is meant to have imperfection.
So you went with a "natural" N/I1/fair?
Wild guess as to why anyone can tell the difference: Lab-grown diamonds are more perfect than mined ones. It's probably pretty trivial to introduce impurities to degrade the color, or change the deposition temperature in order to create faults in the lattice. Hell, throw in a microparticle or two for inclusions.
I'd love to know more though, anyone got a reference?
As a producer, I don't see any incentive to make them imperfect on purpose, yet still distinguishable from mined diamonds. All larger diamonds intended for gemstones come with independent grading reports, which will still identify it as grown regardless of presence or lack of impurities and imperfections.
While not technically correct, some of the advanced detection equipment can be thought of like looking at growth rings on a tree. You (probably) can't replicate the growth rings of a 200 year old tree in a 5 year old tree, yet both are perfectly valid sources of wood (sustainability, etc. aside).
I don't intend to commercialize it at all, but if I can 1) learn a lot, 2) make an open design that others can build on, and 3) (the long shot) make small diamonds for my wedding ring at the end of the year, I'll be a happy man.
If anyone is interested in working on this (particularly if you have experience designing systems dealing with pressurized gasses), my email is in my profile.
I've been learning a lot from that, though it's focused on laying down semiconductor layers; most of the info on CVD diamonds seems to be locked away in proprietary processes for various manufacturers. I foresee a lot of failed experiments in my future!
I propose the name Moon Stone.
Star fire would have been great but it'll be confused with Sapphire.
See ffg for effect of company name pronunciability on market share, stock price, brand value...
There is no future for mined diamonds.
[1] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/1200C-Chemical-vapor-...
It's most definitely a natural diamond, and it's also most definitely undiscovered in some incredibly rich diamond deposit.
I once heard a dollar a caret from one of the startups a decade ago...
Also, I do know that you can get synthetic ruby for ~$1/carat on ali-baba. (I actually bought a few)
That said, check out this cool picture: https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/shrinknp_800_800/AAEAAQAAAAA... I didn't realize it was so industrial...
Why?
If someone bought a manufactured stone expecting it to have been mined (and paid the premium currently accorded to mined stones), the buyer might direct a fraction of their disappointment at the manufacturer, instead of the deserving fraudulent seller.
Adding a nigh-invisible mark makes it trivial for a jeweler to tell the difference, and stops all but the least-informed fraudulent sellers before they begin.