Diamonds are a girl’s best (fake) friend
De Beers makes artificial gemstones to help weed out synthetic ones, writes Thomas Biesheuvel
SCIENTISTS at De Beers can make near flawless diamonds in a lab, but they will never sell you one. The mining company’s Element Six unit, named for the carbon atom’s rank on the periodic table, makes gems that are as perfect as any found at Tiffany & Company stores, yet their destination is a 1980s London office complex. There, a team of 62 studies their creations and develops machines for diamond buyers trying to spot synthetic stones being peddled as the real thing.
While still a small part of the market, man-made diamonds are being mass produced, and retailers such as Walmart Stores sell them to customers seeking cheaper alternatives.
But because the gems are almost indistinguishable from those naturally formed, some sellers have tried to pass off synthetic types as ones that have been mined.
Parcels in Indian cutting centres were found to contain a mixture of man-made and mined gems. For De Beers, cheaters pose a risk to consumer confidence in an $80bn global industry.
“We’re very focused on detection,” says Simon Lawson, head of Technologies UK at De Beers. “It underpins the inte- grity of natural diamonds and ensures that consumers cannot be duped into buying a synthetic diamond.”
The illegal art of mixing man-made with mined gems, known as peppering, is a threat to producers’ efforts to defend and promote the image of natural diamonds that command a premium to man-made. While De Beers makes its own synthetic stones, 99% of those are used for industrial purposes such as oil-rig drills, with the gem-quality types destined only to help the company identify those made in other labs.
Retailers sell man-made gems at discounts of 30% to 40%. Technicians create them using a carbon seed in a microwave chamber with methane or another carboncontaining gas and then superheated into a glowing plasma ball. That creates particles that crystallise into diamonds in as many as 10 weeks.
While synthetics make up just a fraction of the market, they have growing appeal to younger buyers.
That is another headache for mine owners, who are under pressure to cut supply and lower prices, because traders, cutters and polishers are struggling to profit amid a credit squeeze and languishing jewellery sales. An index of polished prices reached a five-year low last month.
At its Maidenhead offices in the UK, the firm’s aim is to create new gems that can fool the detection machines so that the company would have a sense of what it would be up against from competing synthetics in the next few years, Mr Lawson says. The researchers have developed three types of machines that sell for as much as $55,000 each, usually purchased by trading bourses.
One device takes about four seconds to scan a stone’s atomic makeup for impurities. The 2% of diamonds that fail the test are then bathed in ultraviolet light and viewed in another machine. Inconsistencies in the phosphorescence and fluorescence glow can tell the operator the gems may be man-made.
“When you polish a gemstone, there is a memory of how it grew,” says Philip Martineau, head of physics at the De Beers Research Centre.
“They’re not mimicking nature. It’s the differences that give us the clues.”
The Gemological Institute of America (GIA) also plans to start making synthetic diamonds to help it spot them.
The great diamond centres have been duped before. In 2012, 600 undisclosed synthetic gems sized between 0.3 and 0.7 carat were found in Antwerp and Mumbai, and more were discovered in 2013 and this year, according to the International Gemological Institute.
A parcel containing 110 man-made diamonds was intercepted in India as recently as February, according to the Surat Diamond Association.
The effort companies such as De Beers and the GIA are making to clamp down on deception benefits retailers, says Daniel Rosen, the owner of 4Cs Diamonds, a jewellery seller in London’s Hatton Garden diamond district.
“It’s an industry that’s built on trust,” he says. “If you break that trust, you are out. You only have to do it once.”
While there is little data on the figure of undisclosed synthetics, organisations including the GIA say more are being detected. India’s Gem Jewellery Export Promotion Council has threatened legal action against those caught peppering.
The Surat Diamond Association, based in the Indian city that is the world’s biggest gem-cutting centre, terminated a diamond manufacturer’s membership in August after it was accused of presenting synthetics as naturally formed, according to a Times of India report.
Findings like those “were a wake-up call for the trade”, Mr Martineau says. “It brought the work we’d been doing into focus,” he adds.
About 360,000 carats of man-made gems were produced last year, compared with 126-million carats of natural diamonds. Synthetic production, fuelled by demand for cheaper alternatives, probably will jump to 2-million carats in 2018 and 20-million carats by 2026, according to researcher Frost & Sullivan.
Despite the increased competition, De Beers has no intention of selling synthetics.
“De Beers’ focus is on natural diamonds,” Mr Lawson says. “We would not do anything that would cannibalise that industry.”