SCIENCE CAN TURN YOUR LATE LOVED ONE INTO A DIAMOND: Would you?

Would you send the ashes of your late loved one to Switzerland to be returned as a blue diamond? Before you recoil, think about what really happens when you’re faced with dispersing or deep-sixing mortal remains. And if you’re not superstitious, there is

mother sat on a shelf in my study and watched me work for almost a year. I have no recollection why she wasn't in something more stylish but there's no getting away from the fact that she was, at this stage, modestly boxed (greyish cardboard, just under two kgs). Granted, there weren't too many people about at the time to wrestle over where she should be scattered, so it was down to me, not her favourite child, to figure out where she might have liked to end up: Joburg; Pietermaritzburg; Sydney, Australia; Lower Hutt, New Zealand; the KwaZulu-Natal south coast, over the Midmar Dam (under which her family farm used to lie), or even back at boarding school in Hilton, which she liked. You see my point?

So she was temporarily but safely shelved between two areas of the bookshelf: Propaganda,

Power and Persuasion and my complete collection of The Adventures of Tintin. But one day, when enough semi-distant family had aligned in the city, we decided to let the sea take her in Fish Hoek, Cape Town. I was careful with the box when I took it down, but fumbled and it fell, spilling out about 100 grams of ash. It would have been a bit awkward scooping her back but I would have managed, had it not been for the herringbone coir carpet.

In the end, I have no idea what part of her remained embedded in the fibres, but for ages, when I looked down, I had these particularly disturbing Picasso Cubist period flashbacks of misaligned features. It was no better on the sea wall. Because it was windy on the day and as no one had really done this before, it was pretty disastrous for those downwind…

Would she have given the go-ahead for a part of her to be sent to Switzerland to be transmogrified into a pale blue diamond? Sure. Would I have worn her? Perhaps not, but if you ask the South African partnership of Gavin Blok and Keith Kroon, the duo behind Swiss-based company Algordanza, (‘remembrance' in Rhaeto-Romanic) I'd be at the back of a growing queue for what they term ‘memorial diamonds'. Gavin and Keith say the company is behind a number of clients' ashes returning as a .3 carat (and upwards) blue-ish diamond. It's blue because of the trace element boron in your body – and a gentle reminder that essentially and chemically we're just one of life's building blocks, right up there on the periodic table along with aluminium. The younger you are, the deeper blue the diamond, as boron is a vigorous facilitator in your metabolism in top gear when you're young. As you wind down, the boron eases back, and in later life you'd return pale sky-blue to grey-white. If you were a staunch vegan and ate a combination of beans, chickpeas, walnuts, broccoli, avocados, dried apricots and the big boron booster, raisins, then you'd be positively ‘tanzanite-ish'. Carbon, however, is the hero element and essential to the process. Fourteen years ago, Rinaldo Willy, a young business school graduate, read that a Russian engineer had cracked the process of making diamonds from ashes. But it was Willy who dreamt up the memorial diamond concept, arguing that if you got around to scattering your loved one's ashes, they were cast in one geographical coordinate. Or boxed under a marble slab. Then you all went your separate ways… with visitations becoming more logistically challenging as the years advance. This way, small but portable, you could live on

One client who had lost his lover requested a diamond set in a stud destined to pierce the one area of his body that brought back the most sensitive memories...

splendidly in 3D facets to be set in a precious metal such as a ring, charm or pendant. One client who had lost his lover requested a diamond set in a stud destined to pierce the one area of his body that brought back the most sensitive memories…

‘One of the big selling points is that we need only 500 grams of ashes,’ says Keith. They’re split in two batches, bagged, vacuumsealed, bubble-wrapped and meticulously tagged. ‘One package is DHL-ed to Switzerland, followed by the second parcel, five days later.’ So you’re in no danger of being lost in transformation or mislaid forever in the twilight zone of lost property.

As for the cost, bank on anything from R30000 to a fairly hefty, but rare, R500000.

Earth-mined diamonds are carbon that has taken a few billion years to become interesting enough to warrant its ‘girl’s best friend’ status, but in the Swiss lab, bank on four to eight months and a four-stage process. It starts with extracting your carbon, taking the resulting graphite and getting the new diamond to form around a ‘starter pack’, a tiny growing seed from De Beers – in essence, a minute real diamond chip. That’s all put under massively high pressure and high temperature for several months. In the final gem-cutting process, the seed is nipped off, leaving you, pure as driven carbon.

While you start out as a rough diamond, you will be cut down to somewhere between .3 of a carat right up to the Algordanza record of 1.72 carats, with a unique authenticity certificate. You’re as hard as the real thing in the end and should your last will and testament dictate, there is no reason why the ever-practical you couldn’t enjoy a second career as a glass cutter or etcher. Either way, gemstone or job opportunity, you would have been expertly cut by an in-house professional with a microscopic serial number lasered on the diamond crown. ‘That’s so each diamond is traceable,’ says Keith, ‘and pretty useful if you are stolen.’ One German client had her safe cleaned out, with her late husband jumbled in with coins, money and other jewels. He was traced by German detectives, returned and re-vaulted.

So that still leaves about 1.5 to 3.5 kilograms of ash, depending on your height and gender, to be scattered or placed in an urn. Then again, you don’t need to be ‘late’ to be a precious memento. The business has expanded with a new division that processes as little as five grams of your carbon-rich hair. Any hair. It makes an equally fetching keepsake, which also dodges objections to using ashes of a ‘lately departed’ on religious grounds. One digital influencer with a million followers has had a gorgeous blue diamond made from her own hair, which she now wears as a reminder of her social network signature line: ‘I am not a phase, I am an era.’ The only caveat is to watch where you source your clippings. With hair extensions from the East, you’d perhaps not want even a distant, manytimes-removed thread of Mao Zedong in your mix. Another man romantically used the hair from his three sons, all very much alive and kicking, so he could present his wife on their anniversary an option of keeping her children at home with her forever.

Keith has another suggestion. ‘If you want to present your fiancée with an engagement ring, you could combine your hair with hers to form a blue diamond together-forever engagement ring.’ He might have to stalk the hairdresser to salvage the locks but it’s a minor bit of sleuthing and collusion for the big reveal. Inevitably, with pets as precious as they are, there was going to be a call to immortalise Wagter or Fifi. A new off-shoot company of Algordanza, Semper Fides (not Fido), deals only with the hair, fur or feathers of the four- and two-legged. One woman has had her parrot done and another client in Dubai, two thoroughbred racehorses. These diamonds can be coloured in the process but Keith draws the line at any technicolour tampering with human carbon. You remain true blue.

As for the cost, bank on anything from R30000 to a fairly hefty, but rare, R500000. Thirtythree countries in the world have rubber-stamped the concept and while there will always be the option of a traditional resting place, there may not always be space. Returning small and perfectly formed, blue, beloved and bequeathed may be the best eco-colours to fly.