Apr 11, 2022
Diamonds 2.0
The future of an artificial industry
Just when it seems like all that was solid has melted into air — books, movies, and music are mostly digital commodities; physical offices are going the way of brick-and-mortar stores; even currency has become a spreadsheet — it is a relief to find that the diamond industry is still rock-solid. Here is a respectable, old trade in precious stones that has remained substantially unchanged in its aims and methods since the Portuguese sent their African and Indigenous subjects into Brazilian mines four hundred years ago. The stones are extracted from the earth, sold through wholesalers, cut, polished, affixed to jewelry, and finally they reach the consumer — either the fabulously wealthy or the lovesick. It’s a fairly direct market that serves a clear end, a rarity in the scattered half-real network of finance capitalism which undergirds the modern global economy. And so long as people continue to marvel at this pretty, incredibly hard rock, the sturdy $87 billion-per-year industry that supplies it will go proudly on.
But in the 1950s, scientists at General Electric put enough pressure on a piece of heated carbon to liquify its atomic structure and rearrange the atoms as an isometric lattice: a diamond. It was hugely expensive, and the result was tiny, but the engineers had accomplished in weeks what took the earth billions of years. With another half-century of innovation, High-Pressure, High-Temperature (HPHT) had become a more cost-effective method of generating small diamonds than mining. In 2020, Chinese manufacturers produced 3 million carats of gem-quality diamonds by crushing graphite.
By the end of the 1980s, scientists in Russia, Japan, and the US had pioneered another method for producing diamonds: Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD). Mostly popular among US and Indian manufacturers and responsible for roughly another 3 million carats a year, this procedure involves pumping carbon-rich gas into a heated chamber with a sliver of diamond already present (the ‘seed’). The gas is turned into plasma through heat or charge, and the free-floating carbon atoms attach themselves to the diamond, effectively accumulating into a larger diamond within minutes. The exact chemistry of the process is still not fully understood, but the economic advantages of lower heat and pressure requirements are clear enough.
The initial progress of these technologies caused some jewelry speculators to panic. But neither HPHT nor CVD could produce large diamonds more efficiently than the mines, and it was the sale of big, expensive diamond jewelry that constituted the bulk of the industry’s revenue. While synthetics swept the industrial market for diamonds–where small diamonds are used as an abrasive for cutting tools or polishing–the jewelry market was mostly untouched, at least until about 5 years ago.
For over a century the diamond industry was monopolized by a single British firm, De Beers, which made clear its opposition to the rising tide of lab-grown impostors. The Diamond Producers Association, a consortium representing the seven biggest diamond mining companies including De Beers, started a “Real is Rare” campaign in 2015, which put forth that only diamonds formed over eons within the earth were ‘real.’ But the writing was on the wall; technical advances had made it possible to cheaply produce bigger and higher-quality diamonds under laboratory conditions. That year in Hong Kong engineers created a 10.02 carat diamond with HPHT, large enough for nearly all jewelry products, and every year since then the record size for lab-grown diamonds has been broken. (This February the International Gemological Institute certified a 150.42 carat lab-grown diamond.) In the last five years, the cost per carat for a lab-grown diamond has fallen from around 65% its natural counterpart to 35%, and polls show that the market’s main buyers — millenials — are happy to consider a cheaper option. Estimates vary, but after less than a decade of large-scale production, lab-grown diamonds now account for 7–12% of all diamond jewelry revenue.
The diamond miners’ marketing gambit failed. In 2018, the FTC ruled that lab-grown diamonds were fully diamonds: “These stones have essentially the same optical, physical, and chemical properties as mined diamonds. Thus, they are diamonds.” Moreover, the leading lab-grown companies outmaneuvered the DPA, positioning themselves as an ethical alternative to the extractive diamond industry, with its history of human rights abuses and environmental devastation. (Whether lab-grown diamonds actually emit less greenhouse gas than mining is still contested, but it’s probably true they’re not funding civil war in Angola). The final concession came when, in 2018, De Beers introduced Lightbox, a lab-grown jewelry line of its own.
As things stand, lab-grown diamonds are poised to reshape the diamond jewelry market. Last year, the US-based Diamond Foundry announced plans to increase production from 1 million carats a year to 5 million, effectively doubling the global quantity of diamonds grown in labs in 2020. Meanwhile, industry analysts forecast that, by 2050, mined diamond production will have ceased altogether, because the world will have run out of profitable mines.
The diamond industry, it would seem, is not forever. This wizened branch of old-world capitalism, which once proudly laid bare the brutal realities of the system that created it, has melted into the air. Instead of De Beers’ coercive monopoly, manufactured demand, and direct exploitation, the new leaders of the lab-grown revolution are tech start-ups indistinguishable from the speculation-fueled brands in the nebulous worlds of cryptocurrency or artificial intelligence. One example is SkyDiamond, founded by British entrepreneur Dale Vince, who hopes to reverse climate change by making diamonds out of carbon emissions in the atmosphere.
But perhaps this is nothing new to the diamond trade. In the 1930s, global economic depression caused diamond sales to slump. De Beers responded with the legendary “Diamonds are Forever” campaign, widely considered the most successful advertising campaign in history, which convinced 80% of the American and European public that diamonds were necessary to get engaged. Further, it convinced them that diamonds were a good investment — even though they aren’t rare (unless a monopoly hoards them) and they lose half their value as soon as you leave the store. Diamonds have always traded on the imagination, and lab-grown diamonds will trade on the same manufactured allure. If the industry’s justification is man-made, why not the gems too? Jewelry designer and writer Aja Raden writes, “The mythology being spun as we speak about synthetic diamonds does nothing to undercut the original myth of diamonds. It relies on it, is built right on top of it — one more stratum of arbitrary belief cementing the lies that came before it.” In other words, the new diamond producers’ specious self-justifications fit right in with the industry. As Raden puts it, “It’s quite literally a lie about a lie.”
