- For most of human history,
diamonds have been the ultimate luxury item.
Useful, beautiful, hard to come by,
and impossible to recreate.
Most of them formed a billion or more years ago,
deep in the Earth's mantle.
Way down there, the pressure and heat is just right
to crystallize carbon into diamond instead of graphite.
It's that crystalline structure that gives diamonds
their unique durability.
They shot to the surface long ago by volcanic eruptions,
and the abrupt drop in temperature locked
all those bonds into place forever.
Diamonds are dramatic and improbable,
so they're immensely valuable.
Except, that part about being impossible to recreate,
it's not true anymore.
Historically, the diamond industry has a lot to answer for.
It operated like a large, price fixing cartel
for most of the 20th century.
It's implicated in horrifying conflicts
in Africa, and elsewhere.
And it's done significant environmental damage.
This we know.
But these days, this industry is grappling
with a whole other curve ball.
Man-made diamonds are on the rise, and fast.
They're cheaper than natural diamonds,
and they're not knockoffs.
- [Wiyu] Both natural diamond
and a synthetic diamond are diamonds.
They are composed of a carbon in cubic structure.
It's kind of extremely difficult right now,
to separate them up visually.
- That's Wuyi Wang, a lead researcher
at the Gemological Institute of America.
He talks us through how the industry ended up here,
and for the record, these are cubic zirconia.
Actual knockoffs, not real diamonds.
We don't have that kind of budget.
Starting in the 1950's scientists began growing
diamond crystals up here on the Earth's surface,
and they could do it in days or weeks, not millennia.
The first method that worked,
high pressure high temperature, or HPHT,
relies on a reaction chamber heated up
to 1600 degrees Celsius and as much pressure
as you would feel on your fingertip,
if you balanced a commercial airliner on it.
- [Wiyu] HPHT technology basically is mimicking
the natural process, how the diamonds form
in the Earth's mantle.
- A more recent technique called chemical vapor deposition,
accomplishes the same task,
and at much lower pressure and temperature.
The process involves methane gas and microwaves.
And honestly, it's beyond confusing.
The Gemological Institute of America
like to describe it as carbon atoms floating
down like snow and accumulating
or depositing on a tiny diamond seed.
Since the 1950's, most lab grown diamonds
have been small and dark in color,
so they've been used to make things
like saw blades and drill bits.
In the past six or so years,
the technology has improved dramatically,
making synthetic diamonds bigger, clearer, more pure
and next to impossible to tell apart from natural diamonds.
Which is fine for drill bit manufacturers,
but it puts the jewelry industry on notice.
- [Tom] We have seen more synthetic diamonds
that come through to GIA.
Many of them unknown, so that is,
they're coming to us and people didn't know
that they were synthetic.
- That's Tom Moses, an Executive Vice President at the GIA.
He and Wuyi pointed to twin challenges
that are facing the jewelry industry.
First, lab grown diamonds are visually identical
to natural ones, but around 30% cheaper.
So if the two get mixed together in supply chains,
value gets really muddy.
The GIA is one of the few organizations
that offer sophisticated testing services
to verify the origin of your diamonds.
- [Tom] To give you an example, we might have to test
on a given day in our laboratories around the world,
50,000 small diamonds between one and two millimeters.
And we're talking about doing that testing and sorting
in between, say, one and two seconds per stone.
- The second challenge is ubiquity.
As the tech improves, the production is going
to go through the roof.
Chinese companies in particular are poised
to flood the market with smaller diamonds.
They've historically been focused on industrial uses,
but as oil drilling slows down worldwide,
they could easily pivot, overwhelming jewelry supply.
- [Wiyu] In one run, they probably can grow 10, 20 carats
of small mini diamonds,
but it takes only a few hours to produce
that many amount of gem quantities, small stones.
They can produce a 200,000 carat
of diamond like this in one month.
- For now, moneyed interests are carefully
following these trends.
Bain & Company, the consulting giant,
puts out a state of the diamond industry
type of report every year.
They emphasize the need for the three D's
to keep synthetic diamonds from polluting
the natural supply:
detection, disclosure and differentiation.
And a few of the biggest diamond companies have teamed up
to launch a hearts and minds ad campaign called
Real is Rare, to maintain demand for natural diamonds.
- [Woman] But I will spend my future with you,
and it will be wild, it will be kind, and it will be real.
- But the technology behind lab grown diamonds
will only improve, which has the industry wondering,
what comes next.
After all of this research, we really wanted
to see some lab grown diamonds for ourselves.
So our team in San Francisco visited the show room
at Brilliant Earth, a jeweler that sells
both natural and synthetic gems.
A place like this is theoretically ground zero
for the battle between the two kinds of diamonds,
but not if you can comfortably market both.
- Some consumers really want something that's natural,
that's mined from the Earth, they like the history
of diamonds that are created billions of years ago.
That has a certain meaning to them.
And then other customers are really excited
about the environmentally responsible characteristic
of lab diamonds, that there's no need for additional mining.
That's a big draw.
- Our team spent half an hour filming
both natural and artificial diamonds,
and struggling to keep track of which was which.
Honestly, it felt silly to even try,
which is really the point.
There are billions of dollars backing both natural
and man-made diamonds.
There's all the painstaking work of detection,
disclosure and differentiation.
And there's the ever advancing technology and science.
But ultimately these are two products
without any practical distinction,
and the industry is going to have to reckon with that.
The sales rep put it best.
- That's, at the end of the day, what matters most
about, you know, the whole diamond industry,
is that something that can play with light,
and everyone likes shiny things.
- Hey, everyone, do you think that artificial diamonds
should count as real diamonds?
Let us know in the comments below
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