The pace of the lab-grown-diamond industry is accelerating,
with a number of prominent companies — such as Diamond Foundry, Pure Grown
Diamonds, and IIa Technologies — perfecting techniques and filing patents.
Although many are focusing their efforts on industrial diamonds, some have
their sights set firmly on the jewelry sector.
One of those is the St. Petersburg-based New Diamond
Technology, which Alex Grizenko, CEO of fellow synthetics company Lucent
Diamonds, is calling the “big news” in the sector.
New Diamond Technology is “still the HPHT [High
Pressure-High Temperature method] winner, recently growing rough that polished
to a 5.03-carat, blue lab-grown diamond,” he explains. Fueling this are
advancements in cubic presses — machines that apply pressure and heat in HPHT —
which are getting bigger and more effective. This technology can now grow
monocrystals of up to 60 carats, and theoretically could create rough diamonds
as large as 100 carats. Many Chinese manufacturers using HPHT cubic presses for
melee sizes are now converting their growth chambers for larger sizes, Grizenko
notes.
“The other HPHT news is what I call the rebirth of diamonds
grown from carbon extracted from organic material,” Grizenko says. Lucent
Diamonds established itself as a leader in this area in 2002, growing diamonds
from flowers such as roses and cherry blossoms. The company now hopes to
commercialize the process further with wedding bouquets.
It has also used HPHT presses to perfect type Ib yellows and
oranges, type IIb blues, and vibrant pink and red diamonds. Some of Lucent
Diamonds’ recent successes include two GIA-certified fancy red diamonds (1.28
carats and 1.48 carats respectively), priced at $30,000 per carat.
“We started making reds in 1997; 20 years later, we finally
perfected the recipe,” Grizenko says.
While the pace of change in HPHT is moving along steadily,
chemical vapor deposition (CVD) techniques are racing ahead, even though CVD
rough is considered more difficult to cut and polish due to its growth
orientation.
“Usually producers only use one technique, but in the long
run, CVD should be able to create a wider range of diamonds than HPHT and will
have more possibilities,” says Clive Hill, president of WD Lab Grown Diamonds.
Recent advances in CVD have led to the growth of larger
stones, better clarities and D through F colors, without requiring further HPHT
heat treatment. With this in mind, Lucent Diamonds plans to begin building a
“diamond growing farm” in the US in 2018, “where diamonds will be grown with an
advanced CVD technology that will utilize energy from the sun,” says Grizenko.
Of course, any talk of advancements in lab-grown diamond
production needs to go hand-in-hand with detection. To address concerns of
undisclosed synthetics in melee parcels, the GIA introduced its Melee Analysis
Service in 2016, which separates natural, untreated diamonds in the 0.005- to
0.25-carat range from simulants and potentially synthetic or treated diamonds.
There’s also the GIA iD100 gem-testing device — a
desktop-suited tool that can “reliably identify mounted and loose natural,
colorless diamonds, separating them from all simulants and synthetic diamonds,”
explains Tom Moses, the GIA’s executive vice president and chief laboratory and
research officer. This piece of equipment, which the lab will demonstrate at
this year’s Hong Kong jewelry show, is intended to be accessible to the trade
at $4,995. Using spectroscopic technology, it offers results in less than two
seconds, and it refers 100% of HPHT and CVD synthetics for further testing,
according to the GIA. Plans are in the works to expand its capabilities so it
can identify pink diamonds as well.
Meanwhile, the International Institute of Diamond Grading
& Research (IIDGR) is also making strides in detection equipment. For
example, its DiamondView device can identify both HPHT and CVD synthetics based
on the luminescence patterns the stones display under the instrument, while the
PhosView can detect the strong phosphorescence that colorless HPHT synthetics
emit. Earlier this year, the IIDGR unveiled the AMS2, which built on this
luminescence factor to reduce the number of stones needing additional testing.
In June, the institute introduced its SYNTHdetect system,
which uses similar technology to the AMS2, but — like the iD100 — can screen
mounted diamond jewelry as well as loose diamonds. The SYNTHdetect also boasts
the industry’s lowest referral rate at around 0.05% — meaning it positively
identifies nearly all colorless and near-colorless natural diamonds, as well as
HPHT synthetics, so only CVD and a small number of natural diamonds need to go
for costly further testing. This is a significant drop from the up-to-10%
referral rate of other synthetic-screening devices. Still, with a price tag of
$16,250, SYNTHdetect is unlikely to be at the top of the average jeweler’s
priority list.
Besides these products, the IIDGR has begun offering
synthetic-diamond detection courses to complement its technological efforts.
As producers make strides and push the boundaries of what’s
achievable in lab-grown diamonds, those specializing in detection will
ultimately be under pressure to keep pace with them. The De Beers Group, with
the IIDGR and its own specialist synthetics innovation arm, Element Six, is
perhaps most likely to lead the way.
As David Johnson, the group’s senior manager of
media and commercial communications, not-so-jokingly puts it: “We play an
internal game of ‘cops and robbers’ [and] challenge each other to develop new
and ever more challenging types of synthetic diamond material — and we then
build our detection instruments around the challenges so we can ensure all
types of synthetic diamonds remain readily detectable.”
Article from the Rapaport Magazine - September 2017. To subscribe click here.