DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER
Nothing can match the opulence and beauty of a diamond, and now an innovative new business is providing an ethical way to wear the world’s most luxurious gemstone,
Why man-made diamonds are the pinnacle of ethical luxury
Finlay Lockie is standing in the impossibly grand but mildly dilapidated drawing room of the faded mansion overlooking the Firth of Forth which he is in the process of renovating. As I move towards him he smiles and holds up a small neatly-wrapped package. ‘Here are some I made earlier,’ he says with a chuckle.
As he folds back the paper, a handful of sparkling gems are revealed. Most are the clear colour of conventional diamonds but there are others: one has a light blue sheen while another has a beautiful pink luminescence. These diamonds are, he tells me proudly, man-made, grown in a laboratory an hour’s drive from where we’re standing, by Lockie and his business partner in their company Bring Diamonds, chemical engineer David Hardy.
At first glance, it is hard to imagine Lockie as a diamond dealer. It can be a notoriously hard-nosed world, and one into which this dapper shipping
lawyer with a penchant for high-octane pursuits like Scottish country dancing and restoring historic houses wouldn’t obviously fit. Yet, he also has a lifelong passion for conservation, and that is where the pieces of the jigsaw begin to fall into place.
‘Do you know how much earth you have to move to get one carat of mined diamond?’ he asks. Before I have a chance to answer, he puts me out of my misery. ‘You have to move up to two hundred and fifty tons for a one carat engagement ring,’ he says. ‘Throw in all of the chemicals used and side-effects like deforestation and soil erosion, and the industry isn’t always to the taste of ethical consumers. But it doesn’t have to be that way.’
The reason it doesn’t have to be that way is because it is now possible to grow
diamonds that are indistinguishable from natural stones, displaying exactly the same quality and clarity as gems which took between one and three billion years to develop. The process starts with a small sliver of diamond – ‘the seed’ – which takes between 22 days and a month to grow into a three carat diamond which, when after being cut in Antwerp, has a retail value of around £12,000.
Lockie and Hardy believe their business has the potential to significantly reduce environmental damage. ‘At the moment man-made gems account for a tiny fraction of the diamond market but as people get more environmentally conscious that will inevitably change,’ says Lockie. ‘With man-made diamonds costing between 20 and 50
‘Two hundred and fifty tons of earth is disturbed to mine each carat of natural diamond’
percent less than natural diamonds, we’re now finding that people who care deeply about the environment are coming to us asking us to grow a specific diamond for them.’
Lockie is one of life’s natural enthusiasts, and his description of the process produces a vivid picture of a mad professor working late into the night on his latest invention.
‘Our lab is like a James Bond set, you’re in the presence of something amazing,’ he says. ‘These machines look like big photocopiers, but when they are running you can look through little windows into the plasma – which is this strange light-purple thing – and you can see these little red things glowing. They are diamond seeds growing before your very eyes. It’s the most phenomenal thing and the science behind it is really something.’
At which point Hardy pipes up. Since their third partner, nuclear physicist Ed Brown, had to retire with health problems, he has been the scientific brains of the outfit.
‘What we’ve created is a mini star in a vacuum,’ he says. ‘Diamonds were around in space before the world was ever formed – they’re specks of carbon from a super-nova that have been super-heated at exactly the right temperature and then crystallised as they cooled.’