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 the town’s gem district, the middle of the diamond universe.
Practically eighty proportion of the sector’s robust and polished diamonds movement by way of the arms 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, nearly to himself, in thickly accented English. “Yellow diamonds of this color are very arduous to seek out. It’s in all probability nicely value 10, possibly 15 thousand bucks.”
“I’ve further exactly like 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 shade and size. To find 3 almost 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 the use 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 might be detected,” he says, “these stones will bankrupt the enterprise.”
Put pure carbon below 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 solid diamonds deep in Earth’s mantle 3.3 billion years previously.
Replicating that surroundings in a lab isn’t simple, nonetheless that hasn’t saved dreamers from making an attempt. For the reason that mid-Nineteenth century, dozens of these present alchemists had been injured in accidents and explosions whereas making an attempt to fabricate diamonds.
Latest a long time have seen a couple of modest successes. Beginning contained in the Fifties, engineers managed to provide tiny crystals for industrial features – 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 the use of a roomful of Russian-designed machines spitting out 3-carat roughs 24 hours a day, seven days each week.