Aron Weingarten brings the yellow diamond as much as the chrome steel jeweler’s loupe he holds towards his eye. We’re in Antwerp, Belgium, in Weingarten’s marbled and gilded residing room on the sting of town’s gem district, the middle of the diamond universe.
Almost eighty share of the sector’s robust and polished diamonds move by way of the fingers of Belgian gem traders like Weingarten, a provider who wears the thick beard and black match of the Hasidim.
“This can be very unusual stone,” he says, virtually to himself, in thickly accented English. “Yellow diamonds of this color are very onerous to seek out. It’s most likely effectively price 10, perhaps 15 thousand bucks.”
“I’ve further exactly adore it in my pocket,” I inform him.
He places the diamond down and appears at me severely for the first time. I neighborhood the opposite two stones on the desk. They’re all the identical colour and size. To find 3 practically similar yellow diamonds is like flipping a coin 10,000 situations and by no means seeing tails.
“These are cubic zirconium?” Weingarten says with out tons want.
“No, they’re actual,” I inform him. “However they had been made by way of a system in Florida for lower than 100 bucks.”
Weingarten shifts uncomfortably in his chair and stares on the glittering gems on his eating room desk. “Until they could be detected,” he says, “these stones will bankrupt the enterprise.”
Put pure carbon underneath adequate warmness and pressure – say, 2,200 ranges Fahrenheit and 50,000 atmospheres – and it’s going to crystallize into the toughest material acknowledged. These had been the situations that first forged diamonds deep in Earth’s mantle 3.3 billion years up to now.
Replicating that setting in a lab isn’t straightforward, nevertheless that hasn’t saved dreamers from attempting. Because the mid-Nineteenth century, dozens of these present alchemists had been injured in accidents and explosions whereas attempting to fabricate diamonds.
Latest a long time have seen a couple of modest successes. Beginning contained in the Fifties, engineers managed to produce tiny crystals for industrial capabilities – to coat saws, drill bits, and grinding wheels.
However this summer season, the first wave of gem-nice manufactured diamonds began to hit the market. They’re grown in a warehouse in Florida by way of a roomful of Russian-designed machines spitting out 3-carat roughs 24 hours a day, seven days each week.