Aron Weingarten brings the yellow diamond up to the stainless-steel jewelers loupe he holds against his eye. We are in Antwerp, Belgium, in Weingartens marbled and gilded residing room on the edge of the citys gem district, the center of the diamond universe.
Nearly eighty percentage of the sectors tough and polished diamonds flow via the hands of Belgian gem investors like Weingarten, a supplier who wears the thick beard and black match of the Hasidim.
This may be very uncommon stone, he says, almost to himself, in thickly accented English. Yellow diamonds of this colour are very hard to find. It is probably well worth 10, maybe 15 thousand bucks.
I have extra precisely love it in my pocket, I inform him.
He puts the diamond down and looks at me severely for the primary time. I vicinity the other two stones on the table. They are all the same color and length. To discover 3 nearly same yellow diamonds is like flipping a coin 10,000 instances and in no way seeing tails.
These are cubic zirconium? Weingarten says without lots wish.
No, theyre real, I tell him. But they were made by means of a system in Florida for less than 100 bucks.
Weingarten shifts uncomfortably in his chair and stares at the glittering gems on his dining room desk. Unless they may be detected, he says, those stones will bankrupt the enterprise.
Put natural carbon under sufficient warmness and strain say, 2,200 levels Fahrenheit and 50,000 atmospheres and its going to crystallize into the hardest fabric recognized. Those had been the conditions that first cast diamonds deep in Earths mantle 3.3 billion years in the past.
Replicating that environment in a lab isnt easy, however that hasnt stored dreamers from trying. Since the mid-19th century, dozens of those current alchemists were injured in accidents and explosions while trying to manufacture diamonds.
Recent decades have visible a few modest successes. Starting inside the Fifties, engineers controlled to supply tiny crystals for industrial functions to coat saws, drill bits, and grinding wheels.
But this summer time, the primary wave of gem-nice manufactured diamonds started to hit the market. They are grown in a warehouse in Florida by means of a roomful of Russian-designed machines spitting out 3-carat roughs 24 hours a day, seven days every week.